The Last of Us 2 – A great video game, but a good narrative journey?
So, the sequel to one of the most loved games of this and the previous console generation is out. I lived and breathed the first game, but how does the second one rate? Read on to find out!
PREVIOUSLY, ON THE LAST OF US…
Normally, stories in video games are there as a frame to hang the gameplay on. Even in RPGs, I often leave the main story until the end when I’ve spent 100+ hours messing about first with side quests and exploration. The Tomb Raider reboot is another example. I loved the game, but couldn’t tell you much about the narrative other than ‘Lara crashes on a spooky island’
[image error]
The Last of Us was different. The PS3 tale of a two-bit smuggler named Joel and his post-apocalyptic delivery adventure with Ellie, the only human immune to a zombie-like plague, across America to a group called the Fireflies, had myself and players around the world enthralled. It was also a game that as soon as I’d finished it, I played through again. And then I bought a PS4 just so I could play it again with better graphics. It wasn’t just the gameplay was fantastic; the excellent story and memorable characters elevated it to masterpiece status and a game I enjoy every time I play it. So when a sequel was announced, I waited with dizzy anticipation…
THESE TURBULENT TIMES
Last of Us 2 has had a troubled birth. First, its release got delayed due to the pandemic, then the plot got leaked and the company tried to shut down any YouTuber who talked about it, causing a massive backlash. On the day of release, it got bombed by negative user reviews, despite overwhelmingly positive scores from the critic reviews. It now seems to become the latest battleground in the SJWs (social justice warriors) vs VSACs (virtue-signalling agenda conspiracists – a term I just made up). On one side the VSACs complain about anything different or that challenges ‘social norms’, and the SJWs shout down any criticism (even if valid) as bigotry.
[image error]
Representation is important (see my previous blog), and if you don’t think it is, then you’re already represented enough for it not to feel like an issue. On the other hand, representation alone is not sufficient – the characters still have to be interesting, and any amount of accusation of bigotry won’t change that. Both sides are as bad as each other, to be honest, and in the middle are the rest of us thinking ‘so, is the game any good?’
Thankfully, apart from a few sketchy details and the hints of drama mentioned above, I managed to get through all that without any spoilers or reading any reviews, so went into the game pretty fresh. Being the massive fan that I am, I pre-ordered the game, installed it on release day, and then refused to play it for several weeks because I had a scientific paper to write and the editor had already asked where the hell it was once. So, with the journal article submitted, I held the controller with trembling hands, sweat beading on my forehead at what raptures and horrors awaited me over the next 30 hours or so…
THE GAME
[image error]
If you don’t care about the story and / or characters that much then purely as a game, LoU2 is hard to fault. The graphics are superb, the game mechanics are bolted on at this point and there are some amazing set-pieces. If you liked the first game, you’ll be doing more of the same stealth / shoot / craft loop here: mainly avoiding or taking out humans from different factions, the same with a variety of infected enemies, or raiding buildings for supplies.
A few of the new additions, however, ended up being annoying rather than anything else. Take the dogs, for instance. They can track your scent, meaning hunkering down stops working and forces you to keep moving out of cover. My transition from ‘oh no, I don’t want to hurt the little doggies!’ to ‘die bitch, die!!’ took about five minutes. Also, my last-ditch strategy when I get stuck of ‘if in doubt, just peg it to the next autosave point’ doesn’t always work as you suddenly have to stand exposed for ten seconds while you open a door. As well as a new enemy that throws acid bombs at you, there are also a few boss battles. After years of battling them in various Final Fantasy games for about 8 hours at a time, I now hate boss battles in anything (apart from Doom Eternal which effectively sticks you in God mode if it thinks you suck at them) as I really don’t have the time to die 4895 times before I finally work it out. But these are just minor niggles and apart from that, the gameplay is solid as it’s ever been.
It’s just a pity then that I played a good chunk of LoU2 like I was rushing through a video game, rather than savouring every encounter as I did with the original. And why’s that, you ask?
PLOT SYNOPSIS SPOILER-THON
[image error]
It’s difficult to discuss the story and characters without MASSIVE SPOILERS, so consider that a warning. Go and play the game if you haven’t already, and come back to see if you disagree enough to rage about my review on Twitter, or congratulate it on confirming your world view.
The game opens with Joel out on patrol, discussing with Tommy about his decision to stop (ie kill all) the Fireflies operating on Ellie to find a cure (the process of which would kill her) and then lie to her about it. The relationship between Joel and Ellie is now slightly awkward, with much left unsaid and unasked.
Fast forward four years and Ellie is out on patrol with her might-now-be-girlfriend Dina after it all kicked off at a party the night before. Joel and Tommy are also out on patrol, and meet up with a traveller called Abby (who you play in this section), who’s been parted from the rest of her group. After she is rescued, Abby brings Joel and Tommy to a house to meet the rest of her group. After Joel shares his name with the others, she shoots him and beats him to death with a golf club. As an inciting incident, it’s a shocking scene that comes straight out of the blue and knocks you for six. It’s also the story’s biggest problem, but not for the reasons you might think (more of that later).
Ellie arrives at the house just in time to witness Abby killing Joel. Thus begins a tale of revenge as Ellie, with Dina in tow (and Tommy a few days ahead), pursues Abby to Seattle, taking on the Washington Liberation Front (WLFs) and taking out Abby’s associates in the process. The encounters get more grisly, culminating in Ellie killing Abby’s best friends – a heavily pregnant woman called Mel and her partner Owen. In some superbly acted cut scenes, Ellie realises the person she is becoming but can’t find the will to back out. At a climactic showdown in an abandoned movie theatre, Ellie and Abby finally face off. With my adrenaline pumping, I poised my fingers on the controller for what lay ahead…
And then, the game fades to black and slams on the brakes like a Ferrari driver at 90 mph heading towards a speed camera in a 30 zone. It wants you to know Abby’s side of the story, and I hope you’re okay with that because you’ll be spending the next 10 or so hours with her going through it all.
Wait – what?
THAT TIME I MURDERED ABBY’S DAD.
[image error]
It turns out that Abby’s dad was a Firefly, and he was the doctor working on the vaccine back at the climax of the first game. With him dead at Joel’s hands, the Fireflies fall apart and disband, and the dream of a cure is lost forever. The Fireflies are, quite understandably, a bit miffed about it.
I have a rather odd relationship with Abby’s dad, being probably the first video game character I actually murdered. This seems a bit odd considering the tens of thousands of Nazis, monsters, zombies, and randos in GTA I’ve killed over the years. The difference here was as I burst into that operating theatre in the first game, I had no idea what the game wanted me to do. I just shot the guy in the head without a second thought, because I wanted to protect Ellie. And you know what? He had it coming. Sorry Abby; sucks to be you, I guess.
THE STORY, OR ‘HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE ABBY’?
[image error]
Ellie’s story in the first section is inter-cut with playable flashback scenes of her and Joel, as their relationship begins to deteriorate under the weight of the lie they are both burdened with. Eventually, Joel tells her what happened at the hospital, and Ellie can’t forgive him for stealing her chance at making a difference to the world. Similarly, Abby’s story flashes back between the events directly leading up to the confrontation and earlier times as you get to know both her, her friends, and their history within the group.
The WLF are in a turf war with another group – a bunch of religious zealots called the Seraphites (aka Scars). On her travels during the main timeline, Abby meets up with a young Scar called Lev, who’s outcast due to them wanting to identify as a different gender. I can imagine the VSACs foaming at the mouth at that little revelation, but it’s an interesting twist on the story, and a lot better than “I stepped in the Forbidden Flowerbed,” or similar (ask Wesley Crusher about that one). Abby and Lev form a strong bond, and probably the best section of her story is about them infiltrating the Seraphite stronghold during a massive WLF raid to try and rescue Lev’s mother.
[image error]
The WLF group are shown as overall decent people trying to build a community, and you get to meet all the lovely people who Ellie (or Tommy) will kill later on, the most charismatic of which is Abby’s friend Manny. You can even play fetch with the doggies!
And this where things start to get muddy, and I felt the game trying to manipulate me. It’s basically the writers screaming at you: “YOU SEE! ALL THOSE PEOPLE YOU’VE BEEN MERRILY SLAUGHTERING HAD LIVES, YOU AMORAL, PSYCHOPATHIC DOG-MURDERER!!”.
[image error]Who’s a good boy? You are!
Problem is, the game doesn’t give you much choice in what you do to progress the narrative. Although you can theoretically stealth your way through a lot of the WLF enemies, you can’t decide not to kill someone in a cut scene – it just happens. It’s a bit like someone pressuring you into eating an extra slice of cake and them calling you a greedy fat bastard for doing so. You are playing through someone else’s story, and it wants you to feel bad because of its decisions, not yours. Compare that to a game like Witcher 3, where all your decisions have consequences that you have to live with and own. Sure, you can kill the witches who demand infant sacrifices from the local population, but come back later and you’ll find the village is dying without their protection. That’s your fault (disclosure – I let them be, so you can add complicity in infanticide to the list of my video game crimes).
This added moral layer of ‘killing is bad, m’kay’ doesn’t apply to the Scars, apparently, who you can murder with impunity without a second thought. Okay, so they’re a bunch of nutjobs who hang and disembowel unbelievers but hey, they do have pet horses.
[image error]
All this considered, I’d imagine there’s a lot of hate out there for Abby, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with her as a character. She’s interesting, has her own moral code, story arc and relationships, and her actions are, in her mind, justified. In a different story where everyone starts from scratch, it would be pretty easy to feel empathy for her. But we aren’t starting from scratch. I have hundreds of hours of being on Ellie’s side, and I don’t care about a character just because the story says I should. That empathy has to be earned, and by waiting so long and after such a pinch point in the story to introduce it all, there’s a mountain to climb to get it.
Once the game finally brings us back to the cinema showdown and your allegiance is supposed to be switched to Abby, our all-new hero has to fight Ellie; something I really didn’t want to do. As a test, I wanted to know happened if I just stood there and refuse to fight? Would an interesting secret cut scene occur? Nope, you die and the scene reloads.
MORE ENDINGS THAN LORD OF THE RINGS
[image error]
After the big showdown at the cinema, Abby proves to be the bigger woman when she finds out that Dina is pregnant via Jessie (who Abby just shot in the head – whoopsie!), and lets them all go.
Fast forward to a few months later, and Ellie (suffering from PTSD flashbacks) and Dina are playing happy families with the baby on a farm somewhere. Tommy, seemingly back from the dead, visits with news that he may have located Abby. Dina tells him to get lost, as does Ellie, but when he goes she gazes longingly at the map he left behind. And that would have been a pretty good place to end the story on a slightly ambiguous note, like in the first game. Was Ellie ready to let go and continue with her life, or would her thirst for vengeance overtake her again? What do we think? Doesn’t matter – she chooses the latter, and the game continues.
A flashback to the party where it all kicked off with Jessie and Dina gives us a hint of her motivation. Ellie has a big, public argument with Joel, the assumption being that guilt is behind her decision. Again, a really good driver. So, with Dina’s warning that their relationship wouldn’t survive this, Ellie sets off again for a few more hours of gameplay.
FANTASY ISLAND
[image error]
To me, the whole Santa Barbara section seems tacked on and unnecessary, but here we go…
Once at her destination, Ellie gets instantly captured by the same group who grabbed Abby and Lev when they arrived and has to fight her way out. On the way, she rescues an emaciated Abby (and Lev) who’d been left for dead and then forces her nemesis to one last fight. Ellie gets the upper hand and tries to drown Abby, but a sudden flashback of Joel changes her mind and she lets Abby go. It turns out that after their bust-up Ellie goes to see Joel and they start to rebuild their relationship. Although this last scene of Ellie and Joel gives us a nice send-off for Joel, it does undermine Ellie’s motivation from the previous flashback. I’m also not entirely sure if this scene actually happened or if it’s just in Ellie’s head, and that’s what she wishes she’d done.
Now missing a couple of fingers from the final fight, Ellie returns home to find Dina gone. She picks up her guitar, tries to string out a tune, and then walks away, presumably to patch things up with Dina, leaving the instrument behind; a symbol of her finally letting go of the past.
Abby, on the other hand, gets no ending at all. We last see her rowing away into the fog with Lev in a ‘Gendry from Game of Thrones’ style, and that’s it. Considering how much emphasis the game put on her story, it’s a bit of an odd decision.
THOUGHTS AND DISCUSSION
THAT BIT WITH THE GIRAFFES
[image error]
Ask anyone who’s played the first game and they’ll probably talk about the giraffe scene, where Joel and Ellie say hello to some escaped zoo animals and discuss what’s going to happen when they finally reach the Fireflies. Taking place near the end of the game, it’s a beautiful moment for several reasons (including some wonderfully understated music), mainly because it rounds off their relationship and all that they’ve been through together up to this point. There’s also the feeling that Joel and Ellie are reaching the end of their journey together, and our time with them grows shorter.
Despite the odd attempt (for example, when Abby shows Lev the aquarium) the sequel can’t reach those heights, because the new characters and relationships aren’t developed enough to generate that kind of reaction. Ironically, the closest it comes is a flashback scene with Joel and Ellie as they visit a natural history museum.
CHARACTERS WITH A LACK OF CHARACTER
[image error]
Pretty much all the characters in the first game were interesting. Tess, Bill, Marlene, David, etc were all multi-layered, had their own stories, and were compelling to be around.
Here’s an example of one of my favourite scenes from the original:
Nothing in the sequel gets anywhere this level. Mainly because none of the new characters in LoU2, except for Lev and Abby, bring much to the table. For Ellie, Dina is just kind of there most of the time, and Jessie doesn’t do anything of note or consequence.
Similarly, Abby’s companions (Manny notwithstanding) aren’t that great either. Owen just comes across as a bit of a dick, who gets his girlfriend pregnant and then loses interest, cheating with the woman he probably should be with anyway (tip: don’t put sex scenes in video games – they always comes across as awkward and cringe-worthy). Fine for Brookside, not that good for The Last of Us. Similarly, Mel spends most of the time walking around looking upset, and kept reminding me of Lambert from Alien for some reason.
SHOCK AND AWE
As mentioned earlier, it’s the death of Joel which causes the biggest shock in the game, as it’s so unexpected. The problem is, it can only be that way once. Compare this with the bit in the first game when Sam gets bitten and his brother Henry is forced to kill him, before turning the gun on himself. That’s shocking, and remains shocking no matter how many times I see it, because we’ve spent a lot of time with both the characters and got to know and like them. At the point Joel is killed, we’ve known Abby for about 5 minutes and that she’s in a love triangle and someone is pregnant.
There’s a great clip on the internet of Alfred Hitchcock explaining the difference between shock and tension – a bomb is under a desk and about to explode. In one version it blows up out of the blue (shock). In the other, the audience knows it’s there, ticking away as the characters talk. It could go off at any second, and the tension mounts up. For a great example in modern cinema, the opening scene of Inglorious Bastards that goes on for about ten minutes is a masterclass of rising tension. We know that Colonel Hans knows the farmer is hiding a family of Jews, and what’s going to happen when he finds them, but Tarantino draws out the inevitable to nearly unbearable lengths. Shock is over in seconds and the audience moves on. The tension stays with us.
[image error]
The game had the ingredients already there but it sacrifices it all for that one shock moment, and by the time it bothers to tell us about Abby’s (quite understandable) motivation it’s all too late. I was trying to find a suitable analogy and think I’ve found one – it’s like not introducing Snape until the 6th Harry Potter book and him killing Dumbledore in his second scene. Snape’s secret history is one of the highlights of that series, but his big memory reveal only works because of all we’ve learned about him and experienced with him up until that point. We care. If you want the audience to feel empathy with the antagonist, you need to throw them a bone and give them a reason way earlier, especially if they’ve done something so seemingly unforgivable when you first meet them.
Imagine this instead: The game opens with the section with Abby as a child at the scene with the zebra and the foreshadowing of the hospital, and remove the exposition of Joel and Tommy doing the ‘previously on’ bit. This establishes Abby’s character and motivations instantly and gives us something to anchor to when we see her again years later. It removes the surprise element somewhat (you know something is going to happen), but seeing Joel being lured into a trap replaces that with rising tension instead. Joel’s death will still be a shock as you’d expect Ellie to make it in time and save him, but there would be that extra layer of understanding.
For clarity’s sake, I don’t actually have a problem with Joel dying. The characters live in a violent world, and the death of the mentor is a powerful driving force in many plots; it’s just that the writers don’t do anything that interesting with it. It’s like the story was written when ‘subverting audience expectations’ was all the rage but then they didn’t know where to go afterwards.
THE SEQUEL
[image error]
If you took out Joel and Ellie, and made this a stand-alone story about a completely different set of characters in the same universe, then despite the issues I think that it would have worked pretty well. Problem is, it’s a sequel to the Last of Us, and it doesn’t.
It doesn’t work because, as a massive fan of the original, at the time of the Abby plot reset I was 100% invested in Ellie’s story and cared precisely 0% about Abby. And without that investment in the characters, it’s just playing another computer game. Throughout those early Abby sections, I just wanted to get through them as quickly as possible and get back to the main story. Which is a pity because as mentioned earlier there’s some great stuff in there. As sequels go, and considering all the other stories they could tell with Joel and Ellie, it all seems unnecessary.
I presume Abby was kept a secret in all the pre-release material (or, indeed, the box) to prevent the Reddit render-farm from guessing the plot, but it feels like a bait-and-switch and not the game which was advertised. Because of that, there’s another reason to feel resentful towards Abby and another hurdle in appreciating her story.
And all for a shocking moment.
So, would I recommend The Last of Us 2?
As a game: Excellent.
As a stand-alone story: Really good, with some caveats.
As a sequel to The Last of Us: Yes, but measure your expectations. Next time I return to this world, I’ll be playing the original again instead.
So, there you go. If anyone needs me, I’ll be scouring the reviews to see what I agree with or can get indignant about. Until next time!
Ed Ryder is a research scientist by day and writes in the evening when he can fit it in.
Like a bit of fun urban fantasy or fancy some hardcore dystopia? Check out his books from the links below!
[image error]
Jack Gilmour: Wish Lawyer on Amazon
[image error]
In Vitro Lottery is out now on Amazon
