Board 8 > Rate the VG Story Day 182: The Last of Us Part II

(+) Yeah! (+)

Todays game is The Last of Us Part II. How would you rate the story on a scale from 1-10?

You can still rate previous days games if you missed them, just write <game name><rating>. If you want to change your rating you can just specify that you are changing your rating. Nominations for future days are also welcome, nominate as many games as you like and I will get to all of them.

Previous Results:
Planescape: Torment - 9.83 (12 votes)
Higurashi When They Cry - 9.69 (8 votes)
Omori - 9.67 (6 votes)
Outer Wilds - 9.61 (22 votes)
Silent Hill 2 - 9.5 (20 votes)
Deus Ex - 9.35 (11 votes)
Nier Automata - 9.25 (31 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations - 9.2 (34 votes)
428: Shibuya Scramble - 9.18 (8 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC - 9.15 (19 votes)
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - 9.1 (14 votes)
The House in Fata Morgana - 9.06 (11 votes)
Yakuza 0 - 9.03 (13 votes)
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 9 (8 votes)
Mother 3 - 8.98 (14 votes)
Steins;Gate - 8.94 (9 votes)
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 8.91 (30 votes)
Umineko When They Cry - 8.88 (13 votes)
Grim Fandango - 8.88 (13 votes)
Zero Escape: Virtues Last Reward - 8.88 (20 votes)
Return of the Obra Dinn - 8.85 (10 votes)
Silent Hill 4: The Room - 8.83 (6 votes)
Suikoden II - 8.8 (11 votes)
Persona 3 - 8.76 (22 votes)
Xenogears - 8.73 (24 votes)
Tales of Berseria - 8.69 (14 votes)
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty 8.67 (31 votes)
Final Fantasy Tactics - 8.67 (27 votes)
Metal Gear Solid - 8.67 (27 votes)
Dragon Quest V - 8.64 (14 votes)
Pyre - 8.64 (7 votes)
Portal 2 - 8.64 (19 votes)
Bastion - 8.63 (12 votes)
Persona 4 - 8.59 (31 votes)
The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask - 8.56 (27 votes)
Disco Elysium - 8.56 (16 votes)
Undertale - 8.45 (42 votes)
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - 8.45 (16 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd - 8.42 (12 votes)
What Remains of Edith Finch - 8.41 (19 votes)
Yakuza: Like a Dragon - 8.4 (5 votes)
Chrono Trigger - 8.39 (40 votes)
Mass Effect 2 - 8.38 (28 votes)
South Park: The Stick of Truth - 8.38 (17 votes)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - 8.37 (15 votes)
Snatcher - 8.33 (6 votes)
Final Fantasy X - 8.31 (56 votes)
Final Fantasy VII - 8.28 (37 votes)
Dragon Quest XI - 8.27 (16 votes)
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective 8.21 (19 votes)
Final Fantasy VI - 8.19 (43 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - 8.17 (42 votes)
The Walking Dead Season 1 - 8.17 (21 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies - 8.16 (16 votes)
Wolfenstein: The New Order - 8.14 (7 votes)
The Last of Us - 8.13 (35 votes)
Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals - 8.11 (9 votes)
Horizon: Zero Dawn - 8.06 (18 votes)
Silent Hill - 8.04 (14 votes)
The Wolf Among Us - 8.04 (14 votes)
Portal - 8 (26 votes)
Xenoblade Chronicles - 7.94 (27 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky - 7.94 (17 votes)
Hades - 7.91 (21 votes)
Spec Ops: The Line - 7.9 (17 votes)
Bloodborne - 7.88 (20 votes)
Life is Strange - 7.85 (31 votes)
Kid Icarus: Uprising - 7.85 (13 votes)
Deadly Premonition - 7.77 (11 votes)
Final Fantasy IX - 7.77 (26 votes)
Professor Layton and the Unwound Future - 7.75 (6 votes)
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - 7.75 (4 votes)
The Sexy Brutale - 7.7 (5 votes)
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors - 7.69 (31 votes)
Bioshock - 7.64 (23 votes)
Doki Doki Literature Club - 7.64 (27 votes)
Celeste - 7.56 (26 votes)
Half-Life 2 - 7.55 (10 votes)
Skies of Arcadia - 7.54 (14 votes)
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair - 7.5 (30 votes)
The Last Story - 7.47 (6 votes)
Mortal Kombat (2011) - 7.46 (13 votes)
Tales of Symphonia - 7.42 (30 votes)
Mass Effect - 7.35 (28 votes)
Earthbound - 7.33 (19 votes)
Psychonauts - 7.58 (6 votes)
Batman: Arkham Asylum - 7.3 (22 votes)
Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma - 7.27 (20 votes)
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - 7.26 (29 votes)
Tales of the Abyss - 7.25 (29 votes)
Hotel Dusk: Room 215 - 7.25 (12 votes)
Red Dead Redemption - 7.23 (11 votes)
Resident Evil 4 - 7.19 (25 votes)
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony - 7.17 (25 votes)
Mass Effect 3 - 7.16 (21 votes)
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - 7.11 (23 votes)
The Stanley Parable - 7.11 (14 votes)
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars - 7.1 (30 votes)
Broken Age - 7.1 (5 votes)
To the Moon - 7.07 (7 votes)
Super Paper Mario - 7.04 (23 votes)
Assassins Creed II - 7.04 (13 votes)
Final Fantasy VIII - 7.01 (31 votes)
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - 7 (5 votes)

I've watched all the cutscenes but not played it.

Not sure if I should rate or not. Investment in the moment is potentially a factor.

10

Nominate Star Fox Adventures

9

Ehh fuck it.

5.

This is tricky to rate

There's a lot of stigma on both sides of the aisle for this one. Someone will claim you're coming off looking bad for some reason that's not directly related to the quality of the story no matter what you say so no reason to think about it from a meta perspective.

I just think it's not very good and that's all that should matter.

6.

It's extraordinary well animated and acted, but the actual writing fumbles big time on the themes it's attempting to convey.

9/10

It's got some hefty themes especially its meditations on violence, the characters are some of the most realistic ever put in a video game, and the production quality is insane which I think masks some of the flaws a little. The pacing is good however the actual structure I think needed some work or reordering. All the emotional moments still landed for me and I still think about the ending over a year later; it's far from perfect and I debate the meaning and point of it all still which is a lot more than I can say about pretty much most other games. It's the type of game where the sum is more than the whole, little moments that stick out to me like Ellie's trip to the museum with Joel or Abby learning to accept and even become friends with the enemy in Lev and Yara, these human moments full of learning, happiness, comradeship, fear, love, & uneasiness all in equal amounts. I'm a bit scattered honestly when it comes to this game, and really I think that's why I love it so much, there's so much to dissect and analyze, and I love to see a game this challenging and hotly-debated over when it comes to stories in video games.

10

There's flaws in certain plot points (like the setup to the finale most notably) but the overall package is one of the most emotionally gripping stories in any media. I was invested in Ellie's quest for revenge, I was invested in seeing Abby's side of the story. The finale is also perfect in my opinion, Ellie breaks the cycle of revenge by letting Abby go after having her dead to rights, which was the perfect end to a tale about the gray area between black and white.

The Last of Us 1 was practically a flawless story but The Last of Us 2 was the more gripping one that you just cannot put down till the end.

The best work from Naughty Dog in my opinion.

I think there is a slight danger of unfairly grading it on a slight curve

Basically because the presentation of ND's stories is so good, so far beyond... I would say 99% of games that get released. The in-game dialogue, the details of the world, the level of acting both voice and physical, and the visuals of it (not pure graphical performance, that wouldn't be applicable here). That alone means it can't score below a certain number to me because I'm sold on that almost immediately. There's such a clear difference between ND's work and almost all other games in that department. To compare big-budget PS games, I thought GoW was pretty good at it but still not quite there, Spider-Man I would say has a clear gulf between it and ND, and FF7R is a fair way off. What makes TLOU ambitious, and TLOU2 even moreso, is that ND had never really married that A+ presentation of story to a plot beyond "treasure hunting". Compared to Uncharted, TLOU and TLOU2 swing for the fence imo

Luckily TLOU2 succeeds for the most part anyway. It's too long so some parts start to lag, contains a few too many contrivances, and the gameplay/story segregation has never been more blatant. But I still cared about all the characters, even the new ones, and I think it largely succeeded at its central challenge (getting you to care significantly about Abby even after she killed Joel) though mileage varies massively on that. Parts of it reminded me of Undertale's genocide route actually. I think it took some fairly bold risks and they mostly paid off and I respect that given that it was a guaranteed hit.

I'd more or less never grade an ND game lower than like a 6 in one of these topics because its house style is, to me, the gold standard. But TLOU1 took a simpler story and nailed all of it, while TLOU2 had a harder challenge and...didn't quite nail all of it but came very close. That's why it's tricky.

Eh
9.5

I enjoyed the game a lot, because that wasn't the story's work. The story is tough to rate, because I agree that the game's presentation of its story including the animation, acting and atmosphere is close to godtier level in gaming, but it just doesn't excuse it of having what is to me no good story to tell, actually not much story at all consdiering it's a 30 hour game. When the story is meant to be the biggest drive, that's a huge problem. I'm really struggling to think of parts of it that is actually good and not just presented well. The flashbacks to this well enough, but you know the conclusion from the start and it also takes the ambiguous ending of the first game and makes it less ambiguous, which was the best part about that ending to me. I think they damage returning characters a good bit while most new ones are boring.

For what has been praised already - I thought the ending was terrible. Not that the cycle of revenge was interesting to begin with, but Abby literally already broke the cycle of revenge. Ellie killed all her friends, Abby came back and spared both Dina and Ellie thus breaking the cycle of revenge right there and then. Only for PTSD to strike Ellie years later and we're at it again only to give Ellie credit for breaking it apparently.

Another thing the game is often praised for is succesfully getting you to symphasize with Abby, which I don't think is impressive at all. Not only is symphasizing with someone that is seemingly the greatest a****** not the groundbreaking telling it's made out to be by the fanbase. It's also obvious from the get go that she obviously had a serious reason for killing Joel and was not simply a psychopath wishing to torture him for no reason. This alone made the first half of the game a bit daunting since at no point did I share Ellie's desire to punish anyone related to Abby at all. Then you spend way too long as Abby after learning the truth (though I get from a gameplay perspective that they should have equal playing time), and she's just genuinely a good person in every other sense, even feels bad about what she did to and you see her relive tragic event after tragic event. Contraty to popular belief I believe they took way too few chances here, and I'd be more impressed if Abby wasn't presented as a good human being in almost every scene with one one huge exception, it fact it almost comes off as unbelievable that she's go through with the act in the beginning with so little hesitation considering how she is otherwise and also the time gone by since Joel killed her father. I find her boring most of all as a result which is a shame when you're spending half the game as her. I'm no big fan of Ellie in this game, but she sure wasn't boring.

I had just been rereading ASoIaF when this game came out. That begins with a character throwing a kid out of a window with the intent of killing him because the kid saw him having sex with his sister, not even completely as an act of impulse, but after a bit of consideration, despite this being completely unnecessary to avoid the truth getting out while creating plenty of other problems. Then much later you start seeing things from his POV and you eventually begin to like him despite that he's a terrible person in so many apsects and being a man of basically no regrets. I remember that made me think of plenty of similar examples and how TLoU2 wasn't doing anything original at all, which it didn't need to be, and furthermore nothing very impressive.

Now, I'll give the story that I do really like discussing it as you can see, so points for that and it's a shame when it came out it was hard to get good discussions about it because leaks were blamed for almost every opinion. Seeing something praised for things you compeltely disagree with can easily make you give a lower score than you would otherwise, so I'll try to be careful with not doing that. At the same time, there's also a limit of how much a good presentation can boost a story when the story itself is as lackluster as I find it to be.

I'll give a 3.5

5

Expected a Quartering video from Ulti

Got something even worse

9.5

5

10

6.5

UltimaterializerX posted...

1/10

Truly and legitimately the worst plot in gaming history
The game is trash. Like actual indefensible trash.

Answer honestly. Have you actually played the game or did you just read the spoiler leaks?

8/10. This would have been a 9 or 9.5 without the last chapter, which I do not like - there it feels like it just turns into violence and cruelty for the sake of violence and cruelty. Until then though, I think its one of Naughty Dogs best, the structure and central twist are fantastic and extremely bold, the way it forces you to reckon with the games themes directly through gameplay is great. I am just disappointed that it didnt end when it seemed like it was going to end. Aside from that its really good and a story that shows how damaging fan expectation can be.

6.5/10

Structurally, it's an abomination. The decision to switch to Abby would've been okay had it been for an hour or so, but 10+ hours? No.

Thematically it's an interesting exploration of revenge tales and POV.

Characters (other than Ellie) ranged from forgettable to meh. Abby has her moments, but never quite won me over.

UltimaterializerX posted...

1/10

Truly and legitimately the worst plot in gaming history, and the revisionist history people are trying to pull to pretend this thing is good is just embarrassing. It shows how most people are just totally unable to see when theyre being psychologically manipulated.

this if nothing else proves how good the story is