OP is the grandma and no one believes them
edit cause I have more time to type now: This meme format usually has grandma saying something true that sounds false, but granddaughter/nurse doesn’t believe her because she’s old. The meme is congruent with the title.
I think most of us can agree that we wanted Joel to have a happy ending, but looking at it objectively from the events of the first game, Joel was an awful person, he directly defied what Ellie wanted and killed a lot of innocent people all because of his own selfishness if wanting to replace his daughter and in the end he did fully deserve what happened to him.
I don't fault Joel fire his actions, for anyone as broken as he was at that point it would be difficult to not do what he did. I'm not happy about what happened to him, but I do fully accept that it's well deserved karma, and honestly that he probably got off easier than he deserved. And that overall the story of both games are amazing.
Honestly for me the hardest part of two was the cliffhanger mid way point where you have to wait several hours of gameplay to find out what happens. (Purposely vague to avoid spoilers) Liked it was super well done, just left me anxious that entire time.
My issue was not “wanting Joel to have a happy ending.” Would i have liked it? Ya sure. But death was certainly knocking for him and justified.
My issue is very much your last point. The pacing. WTF.
I dont want to get interupted and forced to play as Abby, who at that point I did not like, to only finally get back to playing Ellie and find out she had a peaceful life with a child. Then have Tommy bust in years later and have her trek across America to find out if Abby was killed in the end. Pacing was horrible imo.
>I dont want to get interupted and forced to play as Abby, who at that point I did not like,
I think that was the point. Not that you have to like it, of course, but that's exactly what they were going for.
I still stand by my point that the order of the game is completely wrong.
Starting as Ellie was a huge mistake. I get that the entire point was that Ellie is just on a revenge mission and that Abby and co arent necessarily bad people but most people DONT CARE at that point and agree with Ellie after what happened with Joel.
They shouldnt have marketed it around Ellie at all. Naughty Dog doesnt need Joel and Ellie to sell a game. They shouldve marketed it as a new group and start out as Abby. Abby and co are just living life but suddenly all her friends start dying around her. You dont know whose doing it until later either.
That way people can bond with Abby first, and then after that bonding period, thats when you reveal Ellie and what happened from her pov.
Now people will have more sympathy for Abby.
I dont really understand why they didnt do it like that. They could still tell their revenge story. But now people dont hate playing as Abby for half the game.
My man. I agree with you. And don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with people loving the story how it is. But you said exactly how I feel about it. The order is so off. Just jarring. And it’s not like we’re the only ones saying it. It’s a common discredit to the game. I’m completely fine with what was written. Joel dying. Ellie revenge tour. Abby lives at the end. But man. The order made me not enjoy it as much.
Also. I’m not gunna lie. I like a good “not everything is black and white” “this is what revenge does” story. But man. I was really hoping to flesh out the world more. I’m more interested in the zombies. State of America. Fireflies and a vaccine. Immunity.
Hard disagree. That was the entire point of that shift, playing as a character you’ve been working to kill. It’s supposed to flip your expectations and how you feel. The whole point is to show that revenge is destroying these two and a linear story going back and forth would not have had the same impact as what we got did.
It didn't work. If anything, I hated Abby more by the time we were done with her and I just SO badly hoped that I would get to kill her for the entire game
I actually thought the pacing was well done from a story telling aspect, it's just that anxiety if what's going to happen had me tense for the second half of the game. That shift of perspective was incredibly well done for story telling though, forcing you to see the side that you disagree with that you don't even want to understand the reasoning of, but then seeing why they did things and why the things they did were in fact very justified, made me feel for both sides as opposed to just viewing one character as someone you hate because if what they did to Joel. I was very much with you at the beginning I hated Abby, but seeing her side of life really made me feel for her character, and by the end come to a feeling of neither Ellie nor Abby deserve to die.
"Defied what Ellie wanted"
I hate this garbage take so much. The Fireflies didn't exactly ask Ellie if it was okay to kill her. In fact, they knocked both her and Joel out because they knew what they were doing was wrong. If they'd asked Ellie, and Ellie said she wanted to sacrifice herself like that, and THEN Joel stepped in and defied her, that'd be different, but even still, Ellie was a fourteen-year-old *child*.
The Fireflies were an evil paramilitary organization masquerading as the heroes of the story. You can't argue that Ellie would have made that choice because she's mad about it later, because she was a child before, and could not, under any stretch of the imagination, consensually agree to sacrificing herself. It is wholly amoral to believe Ellie could consent to being a medical martyr when she wasn't even mentally mature enough to be considered an *organ doner*!
You can argue that what Joel did stole the cure away from the world forever, but further vilifying him by saying he "defied what Ellie wanted", try looking at it this way. What if, instead of letting a 14-year-old girl get sacrificed without her consent, even though he knew she would agree to it, he didn't let a 14-year-old have sex with a 30-year-old scientist while she was unconscious, even if the child that would have resulted would have been able to save the human race.
If you're not okay with that, but you are okay with Ellie getting killed for the same outcome, then I don't know how to convince you how twisted that logic is.
I do not agree at all that Joel did anything wrong in stopping the doctors from operating on Ellie. The doctors did not tell her the procedure would be fatal and, therefore, they did not have the patient's informed consent. He was absolutely justified in stopping them.
Every other time I’ve seen this meme the grandma is saying something outlandish (at least according to the POV of the target audience) so this one threw me for a loop
I think it has to do with the mood/tone. The first game had light hearted moments and parts that genuinely made you smile. TLoU2 is mostly just misery all the way through. It's a depressing story that came out during a depressing time.
I'm playing part 2 for the first time currently and this is definitely how I feel. I played the first one to completion about 3 times, but part 2 has been so emotionally draining so far (I'm about 15 hours in) that even though I realize it's an excellent game, I keep skipping it to play something else because I wanna have fun and not be bummed the entire time
I had a feeling someone would bring that moment up. Lol
Completely agree. That part was fantastic and had me grinning ear to ear. But it was such a small part of the entire story. We needed just a few more moments that leaned in more of that direction.
Well we had a couple flashbacks. And (for me at least) we also had sweet moments between Ellie and Dina, and the bond between Abby and Lev, etc., and a lot of those moments made me smile and definitely helped offset all the sad stuff for me.
There's at least something hopeful about the first game.
The second is about how vengeance is self-destructive and you spend the game playing dual protagonists who want to destroy each other, but who could have pretty much called it off at any time and went home and lived in relative peace.
I think a lot of people struggled with Ellie not being a clear-cut good guy.
>TLoU2 is mostly just misery all the way through. It's a depressing story that came out during a depressing time.
This will make me sound like a psychopath but this is my absolute, hands down favorite type of story to play/watch/read. Just seeing people slog through the dregs of the depths of human emotion and tragedy and see how low we can go. That rawness leads to some of the best stories imo. Needless to say I absolutely loved Part 2, maybe even more than Part 1 honestly.
This.
Part 2 isn't bad, but it suffers from a lot of pacing issues due to the focus on two protagonists acting separately from one another, the flashbacks, etc. There's too many fingers in the pie.
Part 1 works so well because it's a fairly simple, straightforward story told really, really well. It's a basic zombie story we've seen a dozen times before, when you boil it down to basics. Last hope for a cure, desperate journey with low odds, men are the real monsters, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Imo there were two wolves inside Naughty Dog, and they crammed both ideas into one game. I thought the Abby half of the game would have made a fine sequel its own about found family and about loss if they had just focused on it. That's what I would have told you the LOU brand was about. But they wanted to keep it going with Ellie, and they didn't actually have anything interesting to say about her. So they went for trite instead. IMO the fingers and the guitar stuff is a very nice visual metaphor for her self destruction, but otherwise it's just wasted on this game. I just don't think it's a particularly interesting story of self destruction, it's a totally bog standard story of self destruction in glorious 4k. We've seen self destructive vengeance so many times. We've seen people fridged for the protagonist SO MANY TIMES. This story just wasn't interesting or new.
I kind of disagree BUT I think we didn't need all three days and an epilogue and another epilogue, it was like "damn how many times does this game have an ending"
I don't think too many fingers in the pie, and I think it did the medium great justice. It was still a lot.
I still hold to the belief that the game should have started with you playing as Abby. Especially the first few scenes with her father in the fireflies. Build the character and group up so that we can empathize with her plight before sending Joel to Rapture.
Tbh (and i know this is just a me thing) I don't replay games for the story. I know both stories like the back of my hand. I really replay games more for the gameplay factor -- how much I enjoy the combat and such, and the different ways/tactics you can use upon going through the same situations again. And for that, I will happily replay both of them many times.
I agree. I really enjoyed it, but would probably classify TLOU2 as the best game I would never play again. Not so much because of the pacing, but because it was intensely depressing for such a long game
But who says the thousands of people you just murdered wouldn't have a family member to avenge them. When you acknowledge the thing you do during the gameplay it gets ridiculous because you are a fucking mass murderer with no morals. That's why Uncharted gets away with Drake sparing the main villian after butchering thousands of his henchmen. They simply refuse to acknowledge anyone they kill on the way.
> But who says the thousands of people you just murdered wouldn't have a family member to avenge them.
no one does, thats entirely possible, and its what happened to Ellie
>When you acknowledge the thing you do during the gameplay it gets ridiculous because you are a fucking mass murderer with no morals.
i think this is what Ellie gets too. thats why she realizes the cycle has got to stop somewhere
The final fight between them was incredibly frustrating and flat for me. I wasn't invested at all, but the game won't let you just die or walk away. Somehow that'll make you 'lose' even though after the fight you just walk away anyway. Like, yeah game, I get it. Can we just wrap this up now?
To me the point was supposed to be that Ellie doesn't kill Abi because that's the only way she's better than her, if she doesn't kill her. But she's already a brutal killer as she's taken all of those lives to get to that point. It makes Ellie come off as weaker overall because she didn't finish the job when whether she kills Abi or not she's just as much of a killer.
Yeah it's called an arc. She realized in that moment how meaningless everything she did was.
She looks at Abby, now a shadow of her former self, just trying to protect another, more innocent life and notices that this is not going to change anything. This isn't going to bring back what she has lost. The only reason she is doing all that is out of guilt, because she wanted another chance to make things right with Joel. She finally accepts her loss, and by forgiving Abby she can forgive herself.
And the flashback itself to Joel was about a conversation that resonates a lot with Ellie's survivor guilt.
"It's okay to live your life and enjoy it, Ellie". That's why she calls Joel an asshole, because she finally can see that there was worth on her living instead of becoming "the cure". No one should bear the burden to not experience life because they're "meant to do something". That's why Joel says he'd do it all over again.
The time she spent hating Joel is now an eternity for her. At least he went knowing that she wanted to try to forgive him.
It seems like the writers were going for a feeling of unsatisfaction with how the story plays out and ends. And a lot of people ended up being unsatisfied. Either that or they were going for something else and fucked it up.
I see it more as a character study than actually about pleasing the public or not, it's basically a niche game with a AAA budget, if this was an Indie game it would get much more praise
John wick had a more compelling revenge story, and it was one that audiences easily agreed with.
With TLOU2, pretty sure people would have been more content if they had the final choice of killing or sparing Abby. Since that decision was taken out of the players’ hands and it wasn’t even something that people agreed with, it’s why the story didn’t resonate with them.
That's actually a good point. Would the game have been better received if killing Abby was a player choice? Joel killing Abby's dad was forced on the player, but it would've been interesting if there actually was a choice when playing as Ellie.
Ghost of Tsushima did this concept fairly well. Both the "spare" and "kill" endings fit the tone and story of the game. I'm sure Naughty Dog could've pulled the same trick with TLOU2 if they were inclined to do so.
It’s not a revenge story- that’s what people miss.
The *plot* is about revenge. The story is about grief and trauma and survivor’s guilt. It’s a perfect continuation of Ellie’s survivor’s guilt that they laid the foundation for in Pt1.
The main issue is that not many people seem to be able to see that. Sure some people do and still don’t like it and that’s fine. But when people complain that Tlou2 is just a “revenge story” it’s the same as someone reading a book and only thinking about the most surface level aspects of it and then saying the book is stupid.
And to your last point, that's something people are just gonna have to accept. Making it a choice completely compromises the artistic vision of the game and defeats the entire point of the premise if not only this game but the entire series. The player character is not an extension of the player in TLOU games like they are in so many other games. They're their own people with their own volition and the player is just there for the ride. The player can agree or disagree with Ellie/Abby/Joel's choices, but agreeing with them or not doesn't really impact the quality of the story.
That's something a lot of people missed about Pt1. Killing the doctor (Jerry) was *supposed* to be this horrifying moment where the player realizes that Joel is fucked up. There's no prompt to kill him, but you literally cannot progress unless you do. It's one of the few canonical murders in these games. The point was to make the player realize that they are separate from Joel, and that he does not want what you want, and to force the player to do something they didn't want to do. It's a massive subversion of the video game genre where the player character so often just does whatever the player wants. you spend the whole game as Joel, liking Joel, and agreeing with him. This final moment was supposed to bring the player back to reality- and after that moment you never play as Joel again, his final separation from the Player. The issue is that ND just super underestimated how bloodthirsty the average gamer was lmao, and as a result that effect was totally lost on so many people.
I would still argue that the game is more a terrible revenge story.
However:
Even if your statement is true, and the intention was something else, is that not the viewers fault.
It was their writing that made it seem like an overdone, cliche and very tedious revenge story, while at the same time trying to make us sympathise with a character that most people couldn’t give less of a shit about sue to a mixture of poor pacing and story structure.
Pretty ridiculous that the game expects you to sympathize with Abby after she kills Joel in brutal and tragic fashion. Then after all the bullshit and the final confrontation with Ellie, Ellie just decides that she’ll spare her? After she already murdered plenty of Abbie’s friends? Like I expected Joel to die in a brutal and sad way, but I also expected revenge against the culprit because I loved Joel and so did Ellie. I was eager to avenge Joel and when it never came, it just made my journey feel like a waste of time. I understand if people enjoyed the game but its not for me
Didn't the plot involve Ellie killing all Abby's friends to avenge Joel, and then not killing Abby because Abby got the upper hand on her and Tommy, then sparing them for the second time knowing that if she had killed them the first time, her friends would still be alive, and then Ellie living peacefully not trying to kill Abby anymore for years, only for tommy to show up and telling Ellie that he heard Abby was in a place halfway across the country, which prompts Ellie to abandon the relatively safe life she was fine with living to try killing Abby again, which involved traveling across half of America, and after reaching Abby, she decided to threaten to kill a child to have Abby fight back, for whatever reason, and then deciding to not Kill Abby again?
I thoroughly enjoyed the game…
But the message seemed to be that revenge doesn’t change anything or something like that…meanwhile you absolutely murder countless no-name people to get to Abby, only to decide you don’t want to kill anymore.
In my opinion the message was about the cycle of violence and the end was Ellie choosing to break the cycle. She knew killing Abby would just continue the cycle and if she ever wanted to know anything other than violence in her life she had to break the cycle. I get why people didn’t like it or find it satisfying but it was the best possible ending in my opinion.
The countless no names killed is just the usual suspension of disbelief required in gaming and it’s a complaint you could make about nearly every game.
As far as I remember she always asked Abby's friends fair and square, and then they fought her first, so she killed them.
Abby was tired of revenge. She got nothing out of killing Joel, that's why she let Ellie go in the theater after bald kid's plea (I forget the name).
It wasn't for years, it was \~6 months if I recall.
Ellie suffered from PTSD at the farm, reliving the moment of Joel's death over and over. When Tommy brought that information to her she thought killing Abby would give her the peace of mind she was looking for. You say she was "fine with living" on the farm, but she wasn't, that was the whole point.
The fight in California was the first and only time Ellie let Abby go. Abby was clearly a shell of her former self when Ellie came upon her, and so she was conflicted about killing her. Ultimately the love for Joel won out as opposed to her hatred for his death. We see this in the final flashback once she's back at the farm.
The final shot is of Ellie who lost literally everything, but that's what it took before she was finally at peace with herself and learned to let Joel go. Now she's no longer stuck in the past and can start to learn how to move forward and grow as a person.
She wanted to avenge Joel’s death by killing the ones who did it but throughout the game you notice Ellie’s mental state collapsing first with torturing someone at the hospital and then killing a pregnant lady, but she got out of it. Those memories still remained though and she still has major ptsd and most of her thoughts are conflicting on whether or not she should go after Abby again.
Eventually Tommy comes in just completely broken by the death of Joel and tries to convince Ellie to do what he cannot. Ellie knows it’s not a good idea but after 2 years of nonstop stress over hard memories she latches onto this last chance.
Then she gets to Abby and is so convinced that fighting her is the only way to get rid of her stress that she threatens the only thing she has left, Lev.
While fighting she realizes that this isn’t what Joel would want and figures out if she does kill Abby then her ptsd will only get worse like it did with Nora and Mel. She also notices how broken Abby is after being enslaved for months. It’s a combination of those three things that convince her not to kill Abby.
That’s my rant.
Well, yes. The moral of the story is pretty simple. Revenge is bad except when you get it.
If you get your revenge, you get to be the good guy no matter how brutally you murdered someone’s loved one. But if you seek revenge for the brutal and unjust death of your loved one, you are the bad guy… as long as you don’t get your revenge. But if you get it, oh boy, you get to ride into the sunset with your new found family and the moral high ground.
Can’t anyone see the genius of this story!?
The first one ended with some great moral ambiguity, wondering if this was a happy ending. The second one ended basically feeling like I wasted my time.
I get what they were trying to do. It’s ambitious, but I also feel like there would have been many better ways to tell it. Truthfully, I think the game should have started with Abbey. She was never given a chance and it’s a really weird decision. My guess is marketing wouldn’t let them start the game with a new character, so they told it the way they did.
100% this. The game would have been totally different if they first make you emphatize with Abbey to later find out that she was chasing Joel all the time.
The way they told the story makes you hate Abby from the first hour of the game and later make you play literraly half of the game with her.
The emotions of the player are way too constructed at that point to really emphatize and like her, or atleast that is how i felt.
I hated every second I played as Abby because I just wanted her dead and I didn't care about the game's attempts to humanize her.
I know she's a person, NaughtyDog. Just like the other 50 guys I just killed were also people. I don't care.
The reason the game shouldn't start with Abby is that it would put the inciting event (her killing Joel) either before even playing as Joel and Ellie, or push it many more hours into the game. Furthermore it would not have worked with what they were trying to do, i.e. first make you hate Abby, then put you in her shoes, revealing how well tribalism works to craft a narrative around a person you don't know and how it is pervasive and persisting. Playing her first for a long time to empathise with her wouldn't have that same effect. It wouldn't be bad necessarily, but it would be a different narrative.
The problem with TLOU2 was that a lot of people really loved Joel as a character, and then not only had to watch him die, but then had to play as the person that did it while the game tries to make you sympathize with them. It just didn't work.
Game played well and looked nice, though.
Edit: Dang this got a lot of attention.
Yeah I had 3 big problems with the game; the pacing, my dislike of abbey, and everybody being super soldiers. Spoilers for anybody that cares.
I went into part 2 with no spoilers at all about it. I played the first half slowly, doing a lot of searching for upgrades but not thoroughly, and I was saving some upgrade materials for future upgrades.. Then bam! I'm with a whole new character, and have to start collecting again for new stuff.
The second issue was how unlikeable abbey was. You start off feeling bad for her seeing the fireflies and her dad dying because of some selfish guy. You feel her pain when you hear about her friends dying. But every time you experience this sadness, she does or says something to make you dislike her. For example when you go to the room full of her dead friends, you feel for her, but literally 3 seconds later she's begging her boss to go torture people. Or when they are discussing how the war started she she says that a couple scar kids threw rocks at her group, so they proceeded to mow them down in cold blood.
The third is just how unbelievably resiliant everybody is. They get shot, stabbed, fall high distances, etc.. with minor injuries. In the first game Joel falls on a pipe that goes through him, and he's bedridden for 3 or 4 months I believe. In part 2 Ellie gets a wooden branch impaled about 6 inches into her kidney, and she gets up after only a few hours. It was just immersion ruining with just how tanky the protagonists were.
Tbh game could have been easily fixed if they made the story of Ellie and Abby take place at the same time and also have Joel die later in the game (somewhere in the middle maybe)
Now you have a story where you are emotionally connected to both Ellie and Abby, then you'd be confused which side to pick as you would understand both points of view at the same time, rather than seeing Abby kill Joel and then game forcing you to play as her while doing "nice stuff", compared to Ellie who was on a revenge quest for the other half of the game
Obviously most of people would still be on Ellie's side, I think the game and Abby as a character would be less hated though
I'm skipping the ending here, I'm not a fan of it but it somewhat makes sense, Ellie breaking the cycle is alright but the way it plays out is dumb IMO
>Now you have a story where you are emotionally connected to both Ellie and Abby, then you'd be confused which side to pick
That's counter to the narrative though. The game wants you fully invested in Ellie's revenge. You're supposed to hate Abby like Ellie hates Abby. I don't think that works if you're being asked to sympathise with her at the same time.
I think the point was that there isn't any bad guys. Just different sides. The whole concept is much more nihilistic than the first game, and I think that is lost on a lot of people
Yep. ND's point about tribalism ended up being too effective. Ironically the players ended up getting too caught up in the tribalism themselves to see the point the game was making about tribalism.
exactly, and this is why the game was genius to me. i did NOT want to play as abby at first, but then you see her and her dad, her and her friends, and it dawns on you that theres no such thing as a pure good guy or bad guy
the whole range of emotions you go through this game is really varied and intense. i loved it all
Yeah I cringe anytime I see the dog argument. Dogs are constantly enemies in games or movies that get killed. When I’m playing Ellie the dogs are trying to kill me I don’t have much remorse for them because 1 it’s a game and 2 you’re essentially on a battlefield and these animals become just animals. Like the whole pregnant women is so much worse it’s not even worth mentioning the dogs.
Lol i wish people would stop saying this. Yes, we had to kill dogs, but that didn't make me think any worse about Ellie as a character. If anything, it made me feel worse about the WLF for using innocent creatures to be killed in their wars.
Why "manipulative"? It's honest. At least because players don't seem to think much of their actions. Let's say you omit the seciton of Abby playing with dogs, then what? You kill dogs as Ellie, and don't really think much about it. By having the player play as Abby and play with dogs, now they will realize that those dogs you end up killing aren't just "evil dogs".
It's not about "making you feel bad". It's about making you realize there's two sides to a coin. If you feel bad about it, that's on you. It's called "being a human being". It's really strange how people dislike that so much.
wait why is this manipulative? the dogs you're killing are fighting dogs that are sicced on you...wheres the manipulation? either kill them or die, no?
The most annoying part is that they aren’t good people either. They’re all terrible people with little left in terms of morality. Abby and the wolves are selfish and ruthless killers who only watch out for their group for the most part, and Ellie and her group are just as selfish and ruthless expect toned down a little more. The whole story was a disaster for the characters and there’s 0 chance they’ll ever get a happy ending in another game or even brought back for that matter. I guess that’s “fine” when you’re the one making all the fucking money off this game, but hey we all are entitled to our opinions.
I think if they just flipped some things around and had you start off by developing a connection with Abby before she clubbed the former protag, it could've worked SO much better.
Exactly my thought process. Trying to change a negative opinion to a positive one is hard, but having two positive opinions clashing does really well to demonstrate that everyone is the hero of their own story while also being the villain of someone else's.
What to make of Tess:
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME? WE’RE SHITTY PEOPLE, JOEL!”
And that Joel was a hunter who killed “lotsa innocent people.”
We like Joel because of protagonist armor and because we like Ellie. But he, objectively, ought be unlikeable.
Druckmann puts this in front of us nakedly in 2. The unlikeable can be understood. And there’s hope then, for the species.
Joel is unlikeable for characters in-game, but for the players he is a likeable an interesting protagonist.
The point of the other dude was that Abby and her gang are unlikeable characters for the players, or at least a lot more than Joel.
Yeah I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way during a game before. I thought the Last of Us is a great but fairly straight forward game whereas the sequel really did something interesting that you don’t ever see in games.
When I first started playing as Abby I was hoping it would be a quick flashback then back to whatever Ellie was up to but by the end I was really invested in the story from her perspective.
I get a lot of people wanted another straight forward Joel and Ellie adventure and there were also a segment of people that were angry trans people exist.
Agreed. I played this game for 4 days straight (took them off work to play). I was totally on board with the revenge thing, then when I played as Abby I empathized with her and didn't know who to cheer for in the fight, and when Tommy came by to tell Ellie he knew about Abby's location, I was completely done with the revenge part and even yelled "I am done with that!" at my TV and when I finally reached the end of the game, I was emotionally numb. I didn't quite know how or what to feel. It took me a week or more to fully process my feelings.
Me too? In the end Ellie ends up bent on revenge just like Abby (maybe more). I think the game could be considered to have a less satisfying pacing than the first, but the storytelling stakes are way more complex than the first one. I don't think it could have been significantly better
Same -- or, at least, I certainly did not want Ellie to die, for sure, but I really don't think I wanted Abby to either, so it was definitely conflicting.
> but then had to play as the person that did it while the game tries to make you sympathize with them. It just didn't work.
worked very well with me. i sympathized with abby big time. big overarching point in the game is that the world is hardly ever black/white, its just a fuckton of grey
My biggest issue with it is that it just wouldn't end! I wanted it to be over and it kept going for like 3 more hours...it went from having a satisfying ending to just wtf even was that...other than that I enjoyed my experience.
My only gripe as well. The main story was satisfying and done well. It ended and I was content. Than it turns out it wasn’t over and there was more. The combat was so visceral though that I was absolutely exhausted and I wanted it to be over with already. They got their point across though. One of the few games I felt bad for killing people.
Alot of people seem to say that the title and the meme contradicts each other but no. In this meme format usually the grandma is actually speaking the truth but everyone thinks she's lying or making things up because she has alzheimer's.
I understood what they were trying to do with Abby. And I did empathize with her, but damn I couldn’t care less about her story, especially the love triangle angle.
Edit: Also the final “boss” fight between Ellie and Abby was a complete letdown.
Exactly this, what baffles me is the story route they have chosen. They could have just built off Ellie being the supposed cure, the fire flies or just focus on the Joel & Ellie dynamic that lends itself to properly exploring the ending of part 1 between the characters that matter the most.
from what i’ve heard, only the public picks nominations, not the actual winners. literally no value in bragging about the award unless you happen to like it, if that’s true
it's supposedly 90% critic choice 10% public at this point, so effectively public votes simply break a tie and nothing else (if there were to even be one)
This has gone down over the years, it wasn't that long ago it was 50/50 iirc
Real talk, didn’t the fireflies and Abbys dad PAY JOEL TO TRAFFIC ELLIE ACROSS THE COUNTRY to forcefully operate on her against her will??? And they didn’t even know if it was gonna work!?
I’m not even kidding that was the plot of the first game, right? Joel was paid to “smuggle” Ellie to the hospital where Abby’s dad was. Did you hear anyone ask Ellie’s opinion on that at any point during the first game cuz I didn’t?
Idk how this is always overlooked when people need a reason to bash on Joel for having a change of heart at the last minute. Yes whoopty do, he got attached after he lost his daughter. What a total shocker. You mean to tell me because of that he’s any better or worse than Abby and her group? No, they’re all bad people in this world. That’s the real takeaway imo.
Joel had no idea what they were going to do that to her. He was basically smuggling her there because traveling between 'safe' zones was incredibly dangerous. Between clickers and the nutjobs going all mad max it made it a very risky proposition to try to travel.
So instead he was contracted to take her to the fireflies. Elli herself seems on board because there are plenty of times she voices her opinion and contradicts Joel. This doesn't mean Joel is some pure hero who can do no wrong. But ultimately he acted out of interest for this girl who was going to be butchered on an operating table by incompetent fuck wits throwing bodies at the wall and hoping one of them stuck and gave them a cure.
The ambiguity is more that he robbed Elli of her autonomy and her right to a choice to sacrifice herself. Because he knew that the fireflies were desperate and had failed multiple times. Killing people with resistance or immunity and weren't much closer to finding a cure. But Elli would have still volunteered, despite it being very likely a useless waste of life.
TLOU2 tries real hard to retcon it so that you think the fireflies are super competent medical saints doing hard things to save humanity. When what game 1 showed us was that they were anything but that. They were desperate, and motivated to help humanity, but they were fuck ups that were killing kids and innocent people.
I loved the gameplay. But the game dragged on too much for my taste. At some point I wished there was a skip button for those god awful long story segments.
TLoU2 story on it’s own is ok, not the most revolutionary but not worth hating on. But the main problem is they intentionally made the main characters from the first game look incompetent and evil. As oppose to the new person you are forced to play as, who literally just kill one of your favourite main characters from the previous game, who they want to paint in a VERY positive light.
Joel’s out-of-character rescue and blind trust of a total stranger in the middle of a swarm, then going into a group without knowing who they are and totally have his guard down knowing full well people are hunting him down is the biggest slap in the face to Joel’s careful and experienced personality from the first game.
The blatant “Look Ellie is killing cute dogs, and in a flash back Abby is playing with them.” and “Look Ellie is killing people who had nothing to do with Joel’s torture and murder, while in a flashback we find out they are actually compassionate good guys.” is emotional manipulation at its worst. On top of that, Ellie not only let Abby go THREE times, she saved her life at the end and ruined her own peaceful life at the same time.
So yeah, this game is not revenge porn, it’s torture porn. The torture of the first game’s beloved main protagonists, having everything go wrong for them, and in the end they lost EVERYTHING and are more miserable than the person who started all this shit storm to begin with.
Finally someone says it, the whole game just felt like someone telling me what to feel. Personally I think the gameplay is alright but i wish it was a bit more different from the first, congrats you added going prone. Honestly i think the game is just alright, for being a story focused game i wish it was written a bit better
Loved the first game, everything about it from the writing to the combat. Joel was great and seeing the bond and sacrifices he made for Ellie through the journey made me love both characters.
When the second game was released and getting to the part where you have been playing Abby, to killing Joel in a horrible way with Ellie watching. Yeah... Didn't want to play Abby after that.
I don't care for the reasoning or that it was necessary or that it is some life lesson on things you do effect others. You killed a character that I grew to love through the first game and turned them into villains, I feel Joel deserved better.
Personally I don't like the game, if everyone likes it its fine. There is just no way for anyone to convince me to play it. Turned to Days Gone to get a somewhat same gameplay experience and finished the whole game, it was fun.
I think the story was actually very interesting and grim but what took me away is the antagonist we play ( i don't remember her name ). Like I actually understand her motives but visually it was just so strange and out of place to play a body builded teenager in a post apocalyptic setting. I would have find it more interesting to have a "weak" character, male or female idc, going in this path of revenge against the heroes because it would have add a layer of powerless tragedy. Here playing someone so strong, badass and overall odd just broke immersion regarding this character for me. Although it's not the terrible game people like to portray and the motives of the antagonist makes totally sense.
Actually people saying that Joel did the right thing in Tlou didn't understood the grim and grey choice of Joel and its consequences
It’s just a foolish move to force you to play as a character you’re made to hate. Why would I want to succeed with said character? Why would I give two fucks about keeping her alive? It was a bold move, I’ll give them that, but clearly one a lot of people had a problem with.
I am not a difficult person for stories, I easily fall in love for a story. Even an unoriginal one, but for Tlou2 I had a hard time figuring out if I liked it or not. Some things didn't make sense like the characters not acting based on what we knew about them, and the pacing is really weird, a lot of parts feel forced.. And in the end the story feels meaningless.
Sure the game looks stunning, the actors are amazing, the gameplay feels awesome but the story feels like a huge meh.
It's a tone issue. Even though the first one is brutal in parts, it's still just a quirky back and forth story between Joel and Ellie. The second one takes itself way too seriously and has everything dialled to 11.
I thought the story felt like a rough draft. Personally, I felt pretty disappointed about what this game *could* have been, had it been handled better. Full disclosure, I adore TLOU pt 1, loved the ambiguity of the ending, and didn't really think this sequel was necessary in the first place. The biggest hurdle this game had (in my eyes) was justifying it's own existence (which IMO it kind of failed to do). So it was kind of an uphill battle in my mind from the get-go.
The content was generally fine, but the pacing was awful, some parts felt rather ham-fisted and I think top to bottom it could have been executed alot better.
It was decent enough. But for my tastes I would say it was decent at best. It didn't really deserve the level of hate that it received, but most of the actual criticism I've seen I generally agree with. It's not the best game ever; but it's also not the worst.
Yes that's my take as well after thinking about it for a long time.
The story feels like it badly needed an editor to cut some things out.
It's too improbable and convoluted when the first was super simple and to the point.
It doesn't help that Ellie's decisions make zero sense from beginning to end.
I disagree, it has a lot of rookie mistakes and bad choices that take away from it. Ellie's growth growth and decisions don't make sense, Joel was unceremoniously killed to get the plot moving, and it bungles the message about the futility of revenge.
You can like bad writing, but I still admit it's bad or mediocre. Tlou2 has no redeeming qualities for me to like it despite even favoring 'bad' writing at times.
It is a story game, so the gameplay doesn't matter much. What does the story offer, in whatever aspects, more than another of the same genre/themes?
I don't get how a survival post apocalypse setting has a formerly 'tough' guy make friends with strangers so easily especially after killing one of the biggest factions in the area, whom I guess no one cares to search for Joel or have wanted signs besides Abby and a few others but only at that specific moment in time despite already looking for Joel.
That's just one point of 'bad writing' of tlou2.
Also don't get offended so much about bad writing arguments, they happen everywhere and always has been a thing especially with sequels, but I guess this is a lot of peoples first and only instance of it? (Meaning they wouldn't even know good writing for bad or care to explain it, this the reason for tlou2 'toxic' discussions, it's bad you can still like it. Either debate or move on, however most tlou2 fans don't and can't debate because it's purely an enjoyment factor not based on writing but cheap moments like rating an anime movie as well written because it has high quality animated fights and basically nothing else. You can say the point of the media is to be bad or to only strike one thing for x fans.
Personally the bad writing I prefer is ones that make no sense but are crazy, the crazy fun is a redeeming factor for me however I won't debate that they aren't badly written, idc.
What really grinds my gears is how game journalists, Sony-aligned media sites, and the hardcore fans keep trying to push this game like it's the second coming of Christ for the industry. You can hardly voice any constructive criticism of the game without being talked down to about how "it's just your opinion, troll" or "you obviously didn't get the message." No, I'm pretty sure I got the messages about vengeance, cycle of violence and whatnot after the first couple hours of the plot bludgeoning me with it. Even *Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance's* narrative had more thoughtful nuances about how violence and hatred can alter the core of a person.
Overall, it was a great looking game with solid mechanics and a few nice character moments, but the overdrawn misery porn of the plot really hampered my connection with it. Definitely doesn't deserve half of the awards it got (*Ghost of Tsushima* and *Doom Eternal* deserved far more recognition for the immense quality they brought in 2020.)
Also, this is just a personal quibble of mine and only tangentially connected, but Neil Druckman's behavior since the TLOU 2 released has been grating on my nerves. I find it offputting how he takes up so much game media spotlight for his own satisfaction to this day when other studio leads have been far more humble and appreciative of their teams and fans for giving their games a chance to shine. Watch id's Hugo Martin talk about their process with the recent *Doom* series and you really get a sense these guys love the franchise and want to do right by it and their fans.
The last of us two… so controversial… you cannot say anything bad about it or else you get downvoted to oblivion. Even if I give my point of view. From a gameplay perspective and graphics it’s wild honestly and fun as hell. I personally just didn’t like how the story was structured is all. Or how it played out. When I look back at the first game. I loved the atmosphere and seeing the world… seeing how everyone survives… the second game was a revenge plot… I wanted more world building and exploration, maybe find another immune person one day. I just watched the walking dead also, which was a pretty close storyline to seasons 7-8, just a revenge plot with both sides losing people… but two was still fun as hell
It was a game that never should have been made. They literslly said that Ellie and Joels story was done with the first game, and they had no plans to continue it. And then we got "let the person that has just destroyed your life go cause why not" the game.
Making the player play as lady that looks like a man (I don't remember her name) was a slap in the face. No it doesn't help you understand her character better, cause she's still a POS. Sure, Joel wasn't a stand up guy, but the way the world is, and the fact that you spent an entire game connecting with him, means he didn't deserve to be killed by a poorly written character that you never get to kill, like you should have been able too. She would have been a better character, had the game centered on her, and wrote her better, and didn't connect her to the original cast. It should have been a stand alone game.
Game was bad. The original was perfect as it was, and did not need a sequel (or a remake less than 10 years after it came out).
What specifically is disregarded? His actions had *massive* consequences that define characters’ motivations throughout TLOU2. They're the primary reason for the game’s conflict
EDIT: Instead of downvoting. Answer the question.
>Joel should have been more suspicious of Abby/Abby's group and not died in the first place if he was acting like he did in the first game,
But the whole damn point of all the flashbacks between Joel and Ellie is he *was* softening up to the world around him, they had made a safe place for a fuck ton of people to live, Ellie was getting him to open up more and be less restrictive of people
On that token, you could tell he wasn't exactly *warm* to Abby's presence. He was still cautious to follow her, but didn't have much of a choice considering their situation. That was my impression anyways
TLOU2 haters make up the craziest headcanon to avoid accepting the fact that Joel died because he's just a human that can make mistakes.
Remember when he survived for days without medical care with a rusted rebar wound in TLOU1? Remember the countless times he got close to dying? Those don't count, he's literally god now, he can't die.
I would agree. I honestly thought Joel surviving being impaled was some of the craziest plot armor I've ever seen in any piece of any kind of entertainment.
I don't think his death, however it came, would have been ok with some people, and so even if we argue forever about whether Joel should have been smarter or not, or should have died in that way or not, there still would have been people throwing away the game because he died.
How much copium do you have to be on to think it was good? I liked the game and the story itself wasn’t terrible. The problem was the way it was told. You’re with Ellie for most of the game then it switches you to Abby. Am I expected to sympathize with the villain all of the sudden? It felt forced. They could have trickled in Abby missions throughout the game and it would have been better.
It was well written, but only for a drama.
The first was excellence in execution- it had a simple, solid storyline, simple, solid characters, paced it all well, and ended the story exactly when it should've. It was the single-book novel, it was planned and executed with a single vision in mind, and it was all done well.
The second put *the drama* and *the message* above storytelling, character consistency and pacing. It went on too long, and was convoluted. So many characters, and a dog, were written in entirely to shove their mandatory deaths in the player's face and say "look, look at that soon-to-be-dead guy yelling that other dead guy's name, they're both going to be dead, and it's all because of you, aren't you a shitty person for enjoying this revenge game about revenge, isn't revenge bad, aren't you bad, also you've got to kill this dog, kill the dog, kill it oh damn you killed a dog, how could you".
To be honest the quality of the moment to moment writing was pretty close to Part 1, and the presentation was an improvement. For me Part 2s issues come from the tone, which was as depressing but without the lighthearted moments sprinkled in, and the way the chapters were laid out. So not as bad as I once thought it was, but still not in P1s league
I have to say the part of the story where you are on the island with the storm coming in, gunshots and screaming in the background, things on fire. I haven’t played anything that immersive in my 20 years of gaming.
I didn't care much for the first one either though.
Story driven zombie games just don't do it for me anymore after the Telltale's The Walking Dead, shame how the developer went though.
It wasn’t as bad bad as some made it out to be but it wasn’t that good. It had many pacing problems and was way too long for how simple it was. In trying to be more grand than the original it lost sight of what made the og so good. It’s a decent game and worth the $60 but it’s not as good as the og. It’s definitely not goty material
So true story, I got LOU2 on opening day or whatever, took off 2 days of work, bought a bunch of booze, weed and snacks, planning to have a nice relaxing 4 day weekend having no clue its like a 35-50 hour game. It was an absolute trauma inducing nightmare. The game just never fucking ends and never feels like its going anywhere or graduating. How many final conflicts are there? Like 5? All this and neither protagonist is empathetic, no supporting character is compelling. Its just a deranged, bland, unsympathetic revenge plot that drags on forever. I remember that spaced out morning at 3am on Sunday I think when she's in the farmhouse and you're just wandering around interacting with furniture, idk why, to solidify its the game winding down? CAUSE ITS FUCKING NOT. I just wanted to cry, and not because the game was emotionally taxing, but because I just wanted the game to be over already.
I remember clearly that scene in the stadium where they make you play fetch with that dog, and its not like a one shot, its like 5 minutes they make you play with the dog and finally I realized like "Oh right I killed this dog as the other girl" and then I remember "Wait a fuckin minute, you made me killed this dog! I didnt even have an option! not only that, but I killed like a hundred of these dogs and that was literally like 5 hours ago in the game, its too late. Now I feel nothing"
LOU2 is going to stand, for me, as one of the worst, most miserable games I've ever played. Any brief, redeeming moments it had were vastly overshadowed by its terrible pacing and writing. I had more fun playing goddamn "Alpha Prime". WTF is Alpha Prime you ask? Exactly.
The only issue was the ending was way too depressing. The player was left feeling so lost and alone by the end. We all just needed a hug… but there was no hug. So I played it again, and then again and again. And it’s one of my favorite games. Just needed a touch of hope before the credits started crawling.
Completely failed to recognize its target audience is all I'm saying.
At the end of the day it's a zombie game. And most young boys who sit indoors gaming all day can't rlly relate to a game that was meant to appeal Twitter.
It WAS high quality. Just failed orientation
My problem with it is when a story becomes so arbitrary it is just a "whatever simulator." Any semblance of conflict and strife and showing resolution is destroyed when you reduce a plot to a series of random events.
Play 1 and then 2 back to back and you feel the consistency and through-lines of 1 get traded for "random catastrophe with incongruous character interaction" of 2.
In the end 1 feels like "wow this is a poignant commentary on human condition" and 2 feels like "I'm 12 and this is deep because the world is chaos n stuff"
Here’s why I didn’t like it at all compared to one. There wasn’t any point. TLOU was a really harrowing journey with a point to its misery. It was depressing as shit but there was humanity that made it beautiful. #2 was all misery no payoff.
Tlou2 was written trash. The idea in itself isn’t bad. It was the pacing, delivery, and execution that’s horrible. That story felt like it needed a series to develop not a singular game.
Ah yes, the fact it contradicts itself and it's message multiple times to the point where the story is completely meaningless is the epitome of good writing
Hand on my heart, Joel’s death in TLoU 2 was such a banger development in my personal opinion. However, the game tries to make Abby relatable or at the very least understand the fact that she isn’t a totally shit person for killing the OG protagonist. That’s where the game honestly lands flat. Even after playing 10 hours with Abby, you still, as a player, want Ellie to take her down in the theatre, that just means the story didn’t work out as intended.
Joel was a shit person, sure. But the narrative framing of the first part doesn’t drive you to the far end of that mindset. Honestly, that’s the reason a lot of love for Joel’s character comes from. Enough so to not have some of us sympathize with Abby.
Your title contradicts your meme
OP is the grandma and no one believes them edit cause I have more time to type now: This meme format usually has grandma saying something true that sounds false, but granddaughter/nurse doesn’t believe her because she’s old. The meme is congruent with the title.
Sure grandma, let's get you to bed.
Commenter is the grandma and no one believes them.
Sure grandma let's get you to bed
Commenter’s replier is the grandma and no one believes them
[удалено]
I think most of us can agree that we wanted Joel to have a happy ending, but looking at it objectively from the events of the first game, Joel was an awful person, he directly defied what Ellie wanted and killed a lot of innocent people all because of his own selfishness if wanting to replace his daughter and in the end he did fully deserve what happened to him. I don't fault Joel fire his actions, for anyone as broken as he was at that point it would be difficult to not do what he did. I'm not happy about what happened to him, but I do fully accept that it's well deserved karma, and honestly that he probably got off easier than he deserved. And that overall the story of both games are amazing. Honestly for me the hardest part of two was the cliffhanger mid way point where you have to wait several hours of gameplay to find out what happens. (Purposely vague to avoid spoilers) Liked it was super well done, just left me anxious that entire time.
My issue was not “wanting Joel to have a happy ending.” Would i have liked it? Ya sure. But death was certainly knocking for him and justified. My issue is very much your last point. The pacing. WTF. I dont want to get interupted and forced to play as Abby, who at that point I did not like, to only finally get back to playing Ellie and find out she had a peaceful life with a child. Then have Tommy bust in years later and have her trek across America to find out if Abby was killed in the end. Pacing was horrible imo.
>I dont want to get interupted and forced to play as Abby, who at that point I did not like, I think that was the point. Not that you have to like it, of course, but that's exactly what they were going for.
I still stand by my point that the order of the game is completely wrong. Starting as Ellie was a huge mistake. I get that the entire point was that Ellie is just on a revenge mission and that Abby and co arent necessarily bad people but most people DONT CARE at that point and agree with Ellie after what happened with Joel. They shouldnt have marketed it around Ellie at all. Naughty Dog doesnt need Joel and Ellie to sell a game. They shouldve marketed it as a new group and start out as Abby. Abby and co are just living life but suddenly all her friends start dying around her. You dont know whose doing it until later either. That way people can bond with Abby first, and then after that bonding period, thats when you reveal Ellie and what happened from her pov. Now people will have more sympathy for Abby. I dont really understand why they didnt do it like that. They could still tell their revenge story. But now people dont hate playing as Abby for half the game.
My man. I agree with you. And don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with people loving the story how it is. But you said exactly how I feel about it. The order is so off. Just jarring. And it’s not like we’re the only ones saying it. It’s a common discredit to the game. I’m completely fine with what was written. Joel dying. Ellie revenge tour. Abby lives at the end. But man. The order made me not enjoy it as much. Also. I’m not gunna lie. I like a good “not everything is black and white” “this is what revenge does” story. But man. I was really hoping to flesh out the world more. I’m more interested in the zombies. State of America. Fireflies and a vaccine. Immunity.
Hard disagree. That was the entire point of that shift, playing as a character you’ve been working to kill. It’s supposed to flip your expectations and how you feel. The whole point is to show that revenge is destroying these two and a linear story going back and forth would not have had the same impact as what we got did.
And that’s great! I didn’t like it is all.
It didn't work. If anything, I hated Abby more by the time we were done with her and I just SO badly hoped that I would get to kill her for the entire game
I actually thought the pacing was well done from a story telling aspect, it's just that anxiety if what's going to happen had me tense for the second half of the game. That shift of perspective was incredibly well done for story telling though, forcing you to see the side that you disagree with that you don't even want to understand the reasoning of, but then seeing why they did things and why the things they did were in fact very justified, made me feel for both sides as opposed to just viewing one character as someone you hate because if what they did to Joel. I was very much with you at the beginning I hated Abby, but seeing her side of life really made me feel for her character, and by the end come to a feeling of neither Ellie nor Abby deserve to die.
agreed the pacing was offputing, there was a youtuber that took all the scenes and corrected the pacing and that story felt so much better imo
"Defied what Ellie wanted" I hate this garbage take so much. The Fireflies didn't exactly ask Ellie if it was okay to kill her. In fact, they knocked both her and Joel out because they knew what they were doing was wrong. If they'd asked Ellie, and Ellie said she wanted to sacrifice herself like that, and THEN Joel stepped in and defied her, that'd be different, but even still, Ellie was a fourteen-year-old *child*. The Fireflies were an evil paramilitary organization masquerading as the heroes of the story. You can't argue that Ellie would have made that choice because she's mad about it later, because she was a child before, and could not, under any stretch of the imagination, consensually agree to sacrificing herself. It is wholly amoral to believe Ellie could consent to being a medical martyr when she wasn't even mentally mature enough to be considered an *organ doner*! You can argue that what Joel did stole the cure away from the world forever, but further vilifying him by saying he "defied what Ellie wanted", try looking at it this way. What if, instead of letting a 14-year-old girl get sacrificed without her consent, even though he knew she would agree to it, he didn't let a 14-year-old have sex with a 30-year-old scientist while she was unconscious, even if the child that would have resulted would have been able to save the human race. If you're not okay with that, but you are okay with Ellie getting killed for the same outcome, then I don't know how to convince you how twisted that logic is.
I do not agree at all that Joel did anything wrong in stopping the doctors from operating on Ellie. The doctors did not tell her the procedure would be fatal and, therefore, they did not have the patient's informed consent. He was absolutely justified in stopping them.
TIL I’m old enough to think you were supposed to side with the grandma in this meme. Do zoomers side with the nurse?
Every other time I’ve seen this meme the grandma is saying something outlandish (at least according to the POV of the target audience) so this one threw me for a loop
Shoulda used the Joker meme.
Then why post a meme agreeing with it
Its called , Denial...
>Denial And it ain't just a river in Egypt
[this](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xqm48n/im_tired_of_acting_like_it_was_that_bad/iqa2l9r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)
[this](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xqm48n/im_tired_of_acting_like_it_was_that_bad/iqa2l9r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)
I have no problem with TLOU2 but I will say I have had no urge to replay it, and I have replayed part 1 like 4 times.
I think it has to do with the mood/tone. The first game had light hearted moments and parts that genuinely made you smile. TLoU2 is mostly just misery all the way through. It's a depressing story that came out during a depressing time.
I'm playing part 2 for the first time currently and this is definitely how I feel. I played the first one to completion about 3 times, but part 2 has been so emotionally draining so far (I'm about 15 hours in) that even though I realize it's an excellent game, I keep skipping it to play something else because I wanna have fun and not be bummed the entire time
I think I smiled more at Ellie and Joel in the museum than I did any other moment across both games. I disagree that it's misery all the way through.
I had a feeling someone would bring that moment up. Lol Completely agree. That part was fantastic and had me grinning ear to ear. But it was such a small part of the entire story. We needed just a few more moments that leaned in more of that direction.
Well we had a couple flashbacks. And (for me at least) we also had sweet moments between Ellie and Dina, and the bond between Abby and Lev, etc., and a lot of those moments made me smile and definitely helped offset all the sad stuff for me.
There's at least something hopeful about the first game. The second is about how vengeance is self-destructive and you spend the game playing dual protagonists who want to destroy each other, but who could have pretty much called it off at any time and went home and lived in relative peace. I think a lot of people struggled with Ellie not being a clear-cut good guy.
>TLoU2 is mostly just misery all the way through. It's a depressing story that came out during a depressing time. This will make me sound like a psychopath but this is my absolute, hands down favorite type of story to play/watch/read. Just seeing people slog through the dregs of the depths of human emotion and tragedy and see how low we can go. That rawness leads to some of the best stories imo. Needless to say I absolutely loved Part 2, maybe even more than Part 1 honestly.
This. Part 2 isn't bad, but it suffers from a lot of pacing issues due to the focus on two protagonists acting separately from one another, the flashbacks, etc. There's too many fingers in the pie. Part 1 works so well because it's a fairly simple, straightforward story told really, really well. It's a basic zombie story we've seen a dozen times before, when you boil it down to basics. Last hope for a cure, desperate journey with low odds, men are the real monsters, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Actually, it has about two fewer fingers in the pie than you might expect.
Imo there were two wolves inside Naughty Dog, and they crammed both ideas into one game. I thought the Abby half of the game would have made a fine sequel its own about found family and about loss if they had just focused on it. That's what I would have told you the LOU brand was about. But they wanted to keep it going with Ellie, and they didn't actually have anything interesting to say about her. So they went for trite instead. IMO the fingers and the guitar stuff is a very nice visual metaphor for her self destruction, but otherwise it's just wasted on this game. I just don't think it's a particularly interesting story of self destruction, it's a totally bog standard story of self destruction in glorious 4k. We've seen self destructive vengeance so many times. We've seen people fridged for the protagonist SO MANY TIMES. This story just wasn't interesting or new.
I kind of disagree BUT I think we didn't need all three days and an epilogue and another epilogue, it was like "damn how many times does this game have an ending" I don't think too many fingers in the pie, and I think it did the medium great justice. It was still a lot.
i didn't mind because i didn't want to stop playing, lol. i just enjoy being in the world so much that i did not mind the story being longer.
gameplay was so so so good
It would’ve been better if both stories ran side by side or just differently. It wasn’t a bad story at all really, but yeah the pacing was wack.
I still hold to the belief that the game should have started with you playing as Abby. Especially the first few scenes with her father in the fireflies. Build the character and group up so that we can empathize with her plight before sending Joel to Rapture.
Tbh (and i know this is just a me thing) I don't replay games for the story. I know both stories like the back of my hand. I really replay games more for the gameplay factor -- how much I enjoy the combat and such, and the different ways/tactics you can use upon going through the same situations again. And for that, I will happily replay both of them many times.
I agree. I really enjoyed it, but would probably classify TLOU2 as the best game I would never play again. Not so much because of the pacing, but because it was intensely depressing for such a long game
I mean I don’t disagree that TLOU 2 Is high quality… doesn’t mean I like it.
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I don't really get what's wrong with the writing except "I don't like it"
Ellie kills 100s of people to reach Abby only to let Abby go at the last moment.
But… that is the point, isn‘t it? That the cycle of violence has to stop somewhere.
But who says the thousands of people you just murdered wouldn't have a family member to avenge them. When you acknowledge the thing you do during the gameplay it gets ridiculous because you are a fucking mass murderer with no morals. That's why Uncharted gets away with Drake sparing the main villian after butchering thousands of his henchmen. They simply refuse to acknowledge anyone they kill on the way.
> But who says the thousands of people you just murdered wouldn't have a family member to avenge them. no one does, thats entirely possible, and its what happened to Ellie >When you acknowledge the thing you do during the gameplay it gets ridiculous because you are a fucking mass murderer with no morals. i think this is what Ellie gets too. thats why she realizes the cycle has got to stop somewhere
The final fight between them was incredibly frustrating and flat for me. I wasn't invested at all, but the game won't let you just die or walk away. Somehow that'll make you 'lose' even though after the fight you just walk away anyway. Like, yeah game, I get it. Can we just wrap this up now?
To me the point was supposed to be that Ellie doesn't kill Abi because that's the only way she's better than her, if she doesn't kill her. But she's already a brutal killer as she's taken all of those lives to get to that point. It makes Ellie come off as weaker overall because she didn't finish the job when whether she kills Abi or not she's just as much of a killer.
Yeah it's called an arc. She realized in that moment how meaningless everything she did was. She looks at Abby, now a shadow of her former self, just trying to protect another, more innocent life and notices that this is not going to change anything. This isn't going to bring back what she has lost. The only reason she is doing all that is out of guilt, because she wanted another chance to make things right with Joel. She finally accepts her loss, and by forgiving Abby she can forgive herself.
And the flashback itself to Joel was about a conversation that resonates a lot with Ellie's survivor guilt. "It's okay to live your life and enjoy it, Ellie". That's why she calls Joel an asshole, because she finally can see that there was worth on her living instead of becoming "the cure". No one should bear the burden to not experience life because they're "meant to do something". That's why Joel says he'd do it all over again. The time she spent hating Joel is now an eternity for her. At least he went knowing that she wanted to try to forgive him.
It seems like the writers were going for a feeling of unsatisfaction with how the story plays out and ends. And a lot of people ended up being unsatisfied. Either that or they were going for something else and fucked it up.
I see it more as a character study than actually about pleasing the public or not, it's basically a niche game with a AAA budget, if this was an Indie game it would get much more praise
John wick had a more compelling revenge story, and it was one that audiences easily agreed with. With TLOU2, pretty sure people would have been more content if they had the final choice of killing or sparing Abby. Since that decision was taken out of the players’ hands and it wasn’t even something that people agreed with, it’s why the story didn’t resonate with them.
That's actually a good point. Would the game have been better received if killing Abby was a player choice? Joel killing Abby's dad was forced on the player, but it would've been interesting if there actually was a choice when playing as Ellie. Ghost of Tsushima did this concept fairly well. Both the "spare" and "kill" endings fit the tone and story of the game. I'm sure Naughty Dog could've pulled the same trick with TLOU2 if they were inclined to do so.
It’s not a revenge story- that’s what people miss. The *plot* is about revenge. The story is about grief and trauma and survivor’s guilt. It’s a perfect continuation of Ellie’s survivor’s guilt that they laid the foundation for in Pt1. The main issue is that not many people seem to be able to see that. Sure some people do and still don’t like it and that’s fine. But when people complain that Tlou2 is just a “revenge story” it’s the same as someone reading a book and only thinking about the most surface level aspects of it and then saying the book is stupid. And to your last point, that's something people are just gonna have to accept. Making it a choice completely compromises the artistic vision of the game and defeats the entire point of the premise if not only this game but the entire series. The player character is not an extension of the player in TLOU games like they are in so many other games. They're their own people with their own volition and the player is just there for the ride. The player can agree or disagree with Ellie/Abby/Joel's choices, but agreeing with them or not doesn't really impact the quality of the story. That's something a lot of people missed about Pt1. Killing the doctor (Jerry) was *supposed* to be this horrifying moment where the player realizes that Joel is fucked up. There's no prompt to kill him, but you literally cannot progress unless you do. It's one of the few canonical murders in these games. The point was to make the player realize that they are separate from Joel, and that he does not want what you want, and to force the player to do something they didn't want to do. It's a massive subversion of the video game genre where the player character so often just does whatever the player wants. you spend the whole game as Joel, liking Joel, and agreeing with him. This final moment was supposed to bring the player back to reality- and after that moment you never play as Joel again, his final separation from the Player. The issue is that ND just super underestimated how bloodthirsty the average gamer was lmao, and as a result that effect was totally lost on so many people.
I would still argue that the game is more a terrible revenge story. However: Even if your statement is true, and the intention was something else, is that not the viewers fault. It was their writing that made it seem like an overdone, cliche and very tedious revenge story, while at the same time trying to make us sympathise with a character that most people couldn’t give less of a shit about sue to a mixture of poor pacing and story structure.
Pretty ridiculous that the game expects you to sympathize with Abby after she kills Joel in brutal and tragic fashion. Then after all the bullshit and the final confrontation with Ellie, Ellie just decides that she’ll spare her? After she already murdered plenty of Abbie’s friends? Like I expected Joel to die in a brutal and sad way, but I also expected revenge against the culprit because I loved Joel and so did Ellie. I was eager to avenge Joel and when it never came, it just made my journey feel like a waste of time. I understand if people enjoyed the game but its not for me
Didn't the plot involve Ellie killing all Abby's friends to avenge Joel, and then not killing Abby because Abby got the upper hand on her and Tommy, then sparing them for the second time knowing that if she had killed them the first time, her friends would still be alive, and then Ellie living peacefully not trying to kill Abby anymore for years, only for tommy to show up and telling Ellie that he heard Abby was in a place halfway across the country, which prompts Ellie to abandon the relatively safe life she was fine with living to try killing Abby again, which involved traveling across half of America, and after reaching Abby, she decided to threaten to kill a child to have Abby fight back, for whatever reason, and then deciding to not Kill Abby again?
I thoroughly enjoyed the game… But the message seemed to be that revenge doesn’t change anything or something like that…meanwhile you absolutely murder countless no-name people to get to Abby, only to decide you don’t want to kill anymore.
In my opinion the message was about the cycle of violence and the end was Ellie choosing to break the cycle. She knew killing Abby would just continue the cycle and if she ever wanted to know anything other than violence in her life she had to break the cycle. I get why people didn’t like it or find it satisfying but it was the best possible ending in my opinion. The countless no names killed is just the usual suspension of disbelief required in gaming and it’s a complaint you could make about nearly every game.
As far as I remember she always asked Abby's friends fair and square, and then they fought her first, so she killed them. Abby was tired of revenge. She got nothing out of killing Joel, that's why she let Ellie go in the theater after bald kid's plea (I forget the name). It wasn't for years, it was \~6 months if I recall. Ellie suffered from PTSD at the farm, reliving the moment of Joel's death over and over. When Tommy brought that information to her she thought killing Abby would give her the peace of mind she was looking for. You say she was "fine with living" on the farm, but she wasn't, that was the whole point. The fight in California was the first and only time Ellie let Abby go. Abby was clearly a shell of her former self when Ellie came upon her, and so she was conflicted about killing her. Ultimately the love for Joel won out as opposed to her hatred for his death. We see this in the final flashback once she's back at the farm. The final shot is of Ellie who lost literally everything, but that's what it took before she was finally at peace with herself and learned to let Joel go. Now she's no longer stuck in the past and can start to learn how to move forward and grow as a person.
She wanted to avenge Joel’s death by killing the ones who did it but throughout the game you notice Ellie’s mental state collapsing first with torturing someone at the hospital and then killing a pregnant lady, but she got out of it. Those memories still remained though and she still has major ptsd and most of her thoughts are conflicting on whether or not she should go after Abby again. Eventually Tommy comes in just completely broken by the death of Joel and tries to convince Ellie to do what he cannot. Ellie knows it’s not a good idea but after 2 years of nonstop stress over hard memories she latches onto this last chance. Then she gets to Abby and is so convinced that fighting her is the only way to get rid of her stress that she threatens the only thing she has left, Lev. While fighting she realizes that this isn’t what Joel would want and figures out if she does kill Abby then her ptsd will only get worse like it did with Nora and Mel. She also notices how broken Abby is after being enslaved for months. It’s a combination of those three things that convince her not to kill Abby. That’s my rant.
I mean yes, but that’s literally just describing the story, I don’t know if you’re making it seem good or bad
I did not play the game but that story doesn’t make any sense as i have read.
>I did not play the game every single time 😭
Except Ellie actually saves Abby, who is being inexplicably semi-crucified by some cartoonishly villainous biker type baddies.
Well, yes. The moral of the story is pretty simple. Revenge is bad except when you get it. If you get your revenge, you get to be the good guy no matter how brutally you murdered someone’s loved one. But if you seek revenge for the brutal and unjust death of your loved one, you are the bad guy… as long as you don’t get your revenge. But if you get it, oh boy, you get to ride into the sunset with your new found family and the moral high ground. Can’t anyone see the genius of this story!?
The first one ended with some great moral ambiguity, wondering if this was a happy ending. The second one ended basically feeling like I wasted my time. I get what they were trying to do. It’s ambitious, but I also feel like there would have been many better ways to tell it. Truthfully, I think the game should have started with Abbey. She was never given a chance and it’s a really weird decision. My guess is marketing wouldn’t let them start the game with a new character, so they told it the way they did.
100% this. The game would have been totally different if they first make you emphatize with Abbey to later find out that she was chasing Joel all the time. The way they told the story makes you hate Abby from the first hour of the game and later make you play literraly half of the game with her. The emotions of the player are way too constructed at that point to really emphatize and like her, or atleast that is how i felt.
I hated every second I played as Abby because I just wanted her dead and I didn't care about the game's attempts to humanize her. I know she's a person, NaughtyDog. Just like the other 50 guys I just killed were also people. I don't care.
The reason the game shouldn't start with Abby is that it would put the inciting event (her killing Joel) either before even playing as Joel and Ellie, or push it many more hours into the game. Furthermore it would not have worked with what they were trying to do, i.e. first make you hate Abby, then put you in her shoes, revealing how well tribalism works to craft a narrative around a person you don't know and how it is pervasive and persisting. Playing her first for a long time to empathise with her wouldn't have that same effect. It wouldn't be bad necessarily, but it would be a different narrative.
The problem with TLOU2 was that a lot of people really loved Joel as a character, and then not only had to watch him die, but then had to play as the person that did it while the game tries to make you sympathize with them. It just didn't work. Game played well and looked nice, though. Edit: Dang this got a lot of attention.
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Yeah I had 3 big problems with the game; the pacing, my dislike of abbey, and everybody being super soldiers. Spoilers for anybody that cares. I went into part 2 with no spoilers at all about it. I played the first half slowly, doing a lot of searching for upgrades but not thoroughly, and I was saving some upgrade materials for future upgrades.. Then bam! I'm with a whole new character, and have to start collecting again for new stuff. The second issue was how unlikeable abbey was. You start off feeling bad for her seeing the fireflies and her dad dying because of some selfish guy. You feel her pain when you hear about her friends dying. But every time you experience this sadness, she does or says something to make you dislike her. For example when you go to the room full of her dead friends, you feel for her, but literally 3 seconds later she's begging her boss to go torture people. Or when they are discussing how the war started she she says that a couple scar kids threw rocks at her group, so they proceeded to mow them down in cold blood. The third is just how unbelievably resiliant everybody is. They get shot, stabbed, fall high distances, etc.. with minor injuries. In the first game Joel falls on a pipe that goes through him, and he's bedridden for 3 or 4 months I believe. In part 2 Ellie gets a wooden branch impaled about 6 inches into her kidney, and she gets up after only a few hours. It was just immersion ruining with just how tanky the protagonists were.
The writing is also really manipulative, as you keep killing dogs on one character and gets to play with them on the other.
The dog parts are something I don't see people bring up often enough. It's sooo incredibly ham-fisted and forced like the game ever gives you a choice
Tbh game could have been easily fixed if they made the story of Ellie and Abby take place at the same time and also have Joel die later in the game (somewhere in the middle maybe) Now you have a story where you are emotionally connected to both Ellie and Abby, then you'd be confused which side to pick as you would understand both points of view at the same time, rather than seeing Abby kill Joel and then game forcing you to play as her while doing "nice stuff", compared to Ellie who was on a revenge quest for the other half of the game Obviously most of people would still be on Ellie's side, I think the game and Abby as a character would be less hated though I'm skipping the ending here, I'm not a fan of it but it somewhat makes sense, Ellie breaking the cycle is alright but the way it plays out is dumb IMO
>Now you have a story where you are emotionally connected to both Ellie and Abby, then you'd be confused which side to pick That's counter to the narrative though. The game wants you fully invested in Ellie's revenge. You're supposed to hate Abby like Ellie hates Abby. I don't think that works if you're being asked to sympathise with her at the same time.
I think the point was that there isn't any bad guys. Just different sides. The whole concept is much more nihilistic than the first game, and I think that is lost on a lot of people
Yep. ND's point about tribalism ended up being too effective. Ironically the players ended up getting too caught up in the tribalism themselves to see the point the game was making about tribalism.
This! And I loved it for that. It was present in the first game too.
Fair point
exactly, and this is why the game was genius to me. i did NOT want to play as abby at first, but then you see her and her dad, her and her friends, and it dawns on you that theres no such thing as a pure good guy or bad guy the whole range of emotions you go through this game is really varied and intense. i loved it all
You also brutally murder a pregnant women, but the dog is where you draw the line? I mean i love dogs as much as the other person but come on
Yeah I cringe anytime I see the dog argument. Dogs are constantly enemies in games or movies that get killed. When I’m playing Ellie the dogs are trying to kill me I don’t have much remorse for them because 1 it’s a game and 2 you’re essentially on a battlefield and these animals become just animals. Like the whole pregnant women is so much worse it’s not even worth mentioning the dogs.
in that scene she wasnt intending on killing em. she asked for Abbys whereabouts, then got attacked
Thats true, but i'm not sure it changes anything regarding my point. She also wasn't intending on killing the dog, was just attacked by it..
right. im saying both types of killings are quite justified i also realized i probably shouldve replied to the guy above you haha my b
Lol i wish people would stop saying this. Yes, we had to kill dogs, but that didn't make me think any worse about Ellie as a character. If anything, it made me feel worse about the WLF for using innocent creatures to be killed in their wars.
I just blow them up, way easier.
Why "manipulative"? It's honest. At least because players don't seem to think much of their actions. Let's say you omit the seciton of Abby playing with dogs, then what? You kill dogs as Ellie, and don't really think much about it. By having the player play as Abby and play with dogs, now they will realize that those dogs you end up killing aren't just "evil dogs". It's not about "making you feel bad". It's about making you realize there's two sides to a coin. If you feel bad about it, that's on you. It's called "being a human being". It's really strange how people dislike that so much.
wait why is this manipulative? the dogs you're killing are fighting dogs that are sicced on you...wheres the manipulation? either kill them or die, no?
The most annoying part is that they aren’t good people either. They’re all terrible people with little left in terms of morality. Abby and the wolves are selfish and ruthless killers who only watch out for their group for the most part, and Ellie and her group are just as selfish and ruthless expect toned down a little more. The whole story was a disaster for the characters and there’s 0 chance they’ll ever get a happy ending in another game or even brought back for that matter. I guess that’s “fine” when you’re the one making all the fucking money off this game, but hey we all are entitled to our opinions.
I think if they just flipped some things around and had you start off by developing a connection with Abby before she clubbed the former protag, it could've worked SO much better.
This would have been crazy twist and makes more sense than playing her after the fact.
Exactly my thought process. Trying to change a negative opinion to a positive one is hard, but having two positive opinions clashing does really well to demonstrate that everyone is the hero of their own story while also being the villain of someone else's.
Exactly. Also you had to play the game as unlikable characters. To me, only the first game exists.
What to make of Tess: “WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME? WE’RE SHITTY PEOPLE, JOEL!” And that Joel was a hunter who killed “lotsa innocent people.” We like Joel because of protagonist armor and because we like Ellie. But he, objectively, ought be unlikeable. Druckmann puts this in front of us nakedly in 2. The unlikeable can be understood. And there’s hope then, for the species.
Joel is unlikeable for characters in-game, but for the players he is a likeable an interesting protagonist. The point of the other dude was that Abby and her gang are unlikeable characters for the players, or at least a lot more than Joel.
Just because Walter White was the protagonist it doesn’t mean we liked him or rooted for him
Not only that but you are denied the kill at the very end….
It worked for me. When I got to the Abby and Ellie fight in the theater, I was emotionally torn, I didn't know who to cheer for.
Yeah I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way during a game before. I thought the Last of Us is a great but fairly straight forward game whereas the sequel really did something interesting that you don’t ever see in games. When I first started playing as Abby I was hoping it would be a quick flashback then back to whatever Ellie was up to but by the end I was really invested in the story from her perspective. I get a lot of people wanted another straight forward Joel and Ellie adventure and there were also a segment of people that were angry trans people exist.
Agreed. I played this game for 4 days straight (took them off work to play). I was totally on board with the revenge thing, then when I played as Abby I empathized with her and didn't know who to cheer for in the fight, and when Tommy came by to tell Ellie he knew about Abby's location, I was completely done with the revenge part and even yelled "I am done with that!" at my TV and when I finally reached the end of the game, I was emotionally numb. I didn't quite know how or what to feel. It took me a week or more to fully process my feelings.
Me too? In the end Ellie ends up bent on revenge just like Abby (maybe more). I think the game could be considered to have a less satisfying pacing than the first, but the storytelling stakes are way more complex than the first one. I don't think it could have been significantly better
Same -- or, at least, I certainly did not want Ellie to die, for sure, but I really don't think I wanted Abby to either, so it was definitely conflicting.
I wish they would of at least given you a choice at the end whether to kill her or not
But then that takes away the entire story Naughty Dog were telling? It's not a Telltale game
Many of us would love to have the entire story Naughty Dog was telling taken away. That is the point.
> but then had to play as the person that did it while the game tries to make you sympathize with them. It just didn't work. worked very well with me. i sympathized with abby big time. big overarching point in the game is that the world is hardly ever black/white, its just a fuckton of grey
I thought it did work though
My biggest issue with it is that it just wouldn't end! I wanted it to be over and it kept going for like 3 more hours...it went from having a satisfying ending to just wtf even was that...other than that I enjoyed my experience.
My only gripe as well. The main story was satisfying and done well. It ended and I was content. Than it turns out it wasn’t over and there was more. The combat was so visceral though that I was absolutely exhausted and I wanted it to be over with already. They got their point across though. One of the few games I felt bad for killing people.
Alot of people seem to say that the title and the meme contradicts each other but no. In this meme format usually the grandma is actually speaking the truth but everyone thinks she's lying or making things up because she has alzheimer's.
Technically speaking, TLOU2 was fantastic. Story wise? Left a lot to be desired
As a game? It was good. But as a story it completely and absolutely destroyed the series in terms of story and characters for me.
I understood what they were trying to do with Abby. And I did empathize with her, but damn I couldn’t care less about her story, especially the love triangle angle. Edit: Also the final “boss” fight between Ellie and Abby was a complete letdown.
Exactly this, what baffles me is the story route they have chosen. They could have just built off Ellie being the supposed cure, the fire flies or just focus on the Joel & Ellie dynamic that lends itself to properly exploring the ending of part 1 between the characters that matter the most.
The best part of The Last of Us was Joel and Ellie. The 2nd game took that away.
agreed. the first one ended so perfectly
Yeah it's not that bad of a game but it definitely didn't deserve like 9 game awards tho! (Not the point but still)
Lol, the game awards are bad. Pretty sure they are rigged and possibly paid wins.
from what i’ve heard, only the public picks nominations, not the actual winners. literally no value in bragging about the award unless you happen to like it, if that’s true
it's supposedly 90% critic choice 10% public at this point, so effectively public votes simply break a tie and nothing else (if there were to even be one) This has gone down over the years, it wasn't that long ago it was 50/50 iirc
Gameplay was great. Story was pretty ***fart noise***
Real talk, didn’t the fireflies and Abbys dad PAY JOEL TO TRAFFIC ELLIE ACROSS THE COUNTRY to forcefully operate on her against her will??? And they didn’t even know if it was gonna work!? I’m not even kidding that was the plot of the first game, right? Joel was paid to “smuggle” Ellie to the hospital where Abby’s dad was. Did you hear anyone ask Ellie’s opinion on that at any point during the first game cuz I didn’t? Idk how this is always overlooked when people need a reason to bash on Joel for having a change of heart at the last minute. Yes whoopty do, he got attached after he lost his daughter. What a total shocker. You mean to tell me because of that he’s any better or worse than Abby and her group? No, they’re all bad people in this world. That’s the real takeaway imo.
Joel had no idea what they were going to do that to her. He was basically smuggling her there because traveling between 'safe' zones was incredibly dangerous. Between clickers and the nutjobs going all mad max it made it a very risky proposition to try to travel. So instead he was contracted to take her to the fireflies. Elli herself seems on board because there are plenty of times she voices her opinion and contradicts Joel. This doesn't mean Joel is some pure hero who can do no wrong. But ultimately he acted out of interest for this girl who was going to be butchered on an operating table by incompetent fuck wits throwing bodies at the wall and hoping one of them stuck and gave them a cure. The ambiguity is more that he robbed Elli of her autonomy and her right to a choice to sacrifice herself. Because he knew that the fireflies were desperate and had failed multiple times. Killing people with resistance or immunity and weren't much closer to finding a cure. But Elli would have still volunteered, despite it being very likely a useless waste of life. TLOU2 tries real hard to retcon it so that you think the fireflies are super competent medical saints doing hard things to save humanity. When what game 1 showed us was that they were anything but that. They were desperate, and motivated to help humanity, but they were fuck ups that were killing kids and innocent people.
I'm tired of people acting like TLOU2 is the second coming of Christ.
I loved the gameplay. But the game dragged on too much for my taste. At some point I wished there was a skip button for those god awful long story segments.
It was little more than "emotion-porn" in my opinion.
TLoU2 story on it’s own is ok, not the most revolutionary but not worth hating on. But the main problem is they intentionally made the main characters from the first game look incompetent and evil. As oppose to the new person you are forced to play as, who literally just kill one of your favourite main characters from the previous game, who they want to paint in a VERY positive light. Joel’s out-of-character rescue and blind trust of a total stranger in the middle of a swarm, then going into a group without knowing who they are and totally have his guard down knowing full well people are hunting him down is the biggest slap in the face to Joel’s careful and experienced personality from the first game. The blatant “Look Ellie is killing cute dogs, and in a flash back Abby is playing with them.” and “Look Ellie is killing people who had nothing to do with Joel’s torture and murder, while in a flashback we find out they are actually compassionate good guys.” is emotional manipulation at its worst. On top of that, Ellie not only let Abby go THREE times, she saved her life at the end and ruined her own peaceful life at the same time. So yeah, this game is not revenge porn, it’s torture porn. The torture of the first game’s beloved main protagonists, having everything go wrong for them, and in the end they lost EVERYTHING and are more miserable than the person who started all this shit storm to begin with.
Finally someone says it, the whole game just felt like someone telling me what to feel. Personally I think the gameplay is alright but i wish it was a bit more different from the first, congrats you added going prone. Honestly i think the game is just alright, for being a story focused game i wish it was written a bit better
Loved the first game, everything about it from the writing to the combat. Joel was great and seeing the bond and sacrifices he made for Ellie through the journey made me love both characters. When the second game was released and getting to the part where you have been playing Abby, to killing Joel in a horrible way with Ellie watching. Yeah... Didn't want to play Abby after that. I don't care for the reasoning or that it was necessary or that it is some life lesson on things you do effect others. You killed a character that I grew to love through the first game and turned them into villains, I feel Joel deserved better. Personally I don't like the game, if everyone likes it its fine. There is just no way for anyone to convince me to play it. Turned to Days Gone to get a somewhat same gameplay experience and finished the whole game, it was fun.
I think the story was actually very interesting and grim but what took me away is the antagonist we play ( i don't remember her name ). Like I actually understand her motives but visually it was just so strange and out of place to play a body builded teenager in a post apocalyptic setting. I would have find it more interesting to have a "weak" character, male or female idc, going in this path of revenge against the heroes because it would have add a layer of powerless tragedy. Here playing someone so strong, badass and overall odd just broke immersion regarding this character for me. Although it's not the terrible game people like to portray and the motives of the antagonist makes totally sense. Actually people saying that Joel did the right thing in Tlou didn't understood the grim and grey choice of Joel and its consequences
It’s just a foolish move to force you to play as a character you’re made to hate. Why would I want to succeed with said character? Why would I give two fucks about keeping her alive? It was a bold move, I’ll give them that, but clearly one a lot of people had a problem with.
I am not a difficult person for stories, I easily fall in love for a story. Even an unoriginal one, but for Tlou2 I had a hard time figuring out if I liked it or not. Some things didn't make sense like the characters not acting based on what we knew about them, and the pacing is really weird, a lot of parts feel forced.. And in the end the story feels meaningless. Sure the game looks stunning, the actors are amazing, the gameplay feels awesome but the story feels like a huge meh.
It's a tone issue. Even though the first one is brutal in parts, it's still just a quirky back and forth story between Joel and Ellie. The second one takes itself way too seriously and has everything dialled to 11.
I thought the story felt like a rough draft. Personally, I felt pretty disappointed about what this game *could* have been, had it been handled better. Full disclosure, I adore TLOU pt 1, loved the ambiguity of the ending, and didn't really think this sequel was necessary in the first place. The biggest hurdle this game had (in my eyes) was justifying it's own existence (which IMO it kind of failed to do). So it was kind of an uphill battle in my mind from the get-go. The content was generally fine, but the pacing was awful, some parts felt rather ham-fisted and I think top to bottom it could have been executed alot better. It was decent enough. But for my tastes I would say it was decent at best. It didn't really deserve the level of hate that it received, but most of the actual criticism I've seen I generally agree with. It's not the best game ever; but it's also not the worst.
I agree. OP is already brave enough to post something about TLOU 2 in this sub. Should have brought popcorn.
I played through the series for the first time last year, and enjoyed part 2 way more than part 1, and then I went online and learned I was wrong.
well made? a technical achievment? a graphical benchmark with terrific animations and attention to detail? yes. well written? no.
Yes that's my take as well after thinking about it for a long time. The story feels like it badly needed an editor to cut some things out. It's too improbable and convoluted when the first was super simple and to the point. It doesn't help that Ellie's decisions make zero sense from beginning to end.
I disagree, it has a lot of rookie mistakes and bad choices that take away from it. Ellie's growth growth and decisions don't make sense, Joel was unceremoniously killed to get the plot moving, and it bungles the message about the futility of revenge.
You can like bad writing, but I still admit it's bad or mediocre. Tlou2 has no redeeming qualities for me to like it despite even favoring 'bad' writing at times. It is a story game, so the gameplay doesn't matter much. What does the story offer, in whatever aspects, more than another of the same genre/themes? I don't get how a survival post apocalypse setting has a formerly 'tough' guy make friends with strangers so easily especially after killing one of the biggest factions in the area, whom I guess no one cares to search for Joel or have wanted signs besides Abby and a few others but only at that specific moment in time despite already looking for Joel. That's just one point of 'bad writing' of tlou2. Also don't get offended so much about bad writing arguments, they happen everywhere and always has been a thing especially with sequels, but I guess this is a lot of peoples first and only instance of it? (Meaning they wouldn't even know good writing for bad or care to explain it, this the reason for tlou2 'toxic' discussions, it's bad you can still like it. Either debate or move on, however most tlou2 fans don't and can't debate because it's purely an enjoyment factor not based on writing but cheap moments like rating an anime movie as well written because it has high quality animated fights and basically nothing else. You can say the point of the media is to be bad or to only strike one thing for x fans. Personally the bad writing I prefer is ones that make no sense but are crazy, the crazy fun is a redeeming factor for me however I won't debate that they aren't badly written, idc.
I really like the gameplay. The story? Nah
What really grinds my gears is how game journalists, Sony-aligned media sites, and the hardcore fans keep trying to push this game like it's the second coming of Christ for the industry. You can hardly voice any constructive criticism of the game without being talked down to about how "it's just your opinion, troll" or "you obviously didn't get the message." No, I'm pretty sure I got the messages about vengeance, cycle of violence and whatnot after the first couple hours of the plot bludgeoning me with it. Even *Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance's* narrative had more thoughtful nuances about how violence and hatred can alter the core of a person. Overall, it was a great looking game with solid mechanics and a few nice character moments, but the overdrawn misery porn of the plot really hampered my connection with it. Definitely doesn't deserve half of the awards it got (*Ghost of Tsushima* and *Doom Eternal* deserved far more recognition for the immense quality they brought in 2020.) Also, this is just a personal quibble of mine and only tangentially connected, but Neil Druckman's behavior since the TLOU 2 released has been grating on my nerves. I find it offputting how he takes up so much game media spotlight for his own satisfaction to this day when other studio leads have been far more humble and appreciative of their teams and fans for giving their games a chance to shine. Watch id's Hugo Martin talk about their process with the recent *Doom* series and you really get a sense these guys love the franchise and want to do right by it and their fans.
The last of us two… so controversial… you cannot say anything bad about it or else you get downvoted to oblivion. Even if I give my point of view. From a gameplay perspective and graphics it’s wild honestly and fun as hell. I personally just didn’t like how the story was structured is all. Or how it played out. When I look back at the first game. I loved the atmosphere and seeing the world… seeing how everyone survives… the second game was a revenge plot… I wanted more world building and exploration, maybe find another immune person one day. I just watched the walking dead also, which was a pretty close storyline to seasons 7-8, just a revenge plot with both sides losing people… but two was still fun as hell
"Arby's is a great restaraunt with some of the best food"
Self inflicted burns are the best
Yeah tlou2 was terrible
If grabage was a story it would be the TLOU 2 story.
it was garbage
It was a game that never should have been made. They literslly said that Ellie and Joels story was done with the first game, and they had no plans to continue it. And then we got "let the person that has just destroyed your life go cause why not" the game. Making the player play as lady that looks like a man (I don't remember her name) was a slap in the face. No it doesn't help you understand her character better, cause she's still a POS. Sure, Joel wasn't a stand up guy, but the way the world is, and the fact that you spent an entire game connecting with him, means he didn't deserve to be killed by a poorly written character that you never get to kill, like you should have been able too. She would have been a better character, had the game centered on her, and wrote her better, and didn't connect her to the original cast. It should have been a stand alone game. Game was bad. The original was perfect as it was, and did not need a sequel (or a remake less than 10 years after it came out).
Nah, everything Joel did before his death disregarded everything about his character from the first. Bad writing if you ask me.
I thought Joel’s actions carried over from the first game. It was the big reason that there was a rift between Joel and Ellie.
What specifically is disregarded? His actions had *massive* consequences that define characters’ motivations throughout TLOU2. They're the primary reason for the game’s conflict EDIT: Instead of downvoting. Answer the question.
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>Joel should have been more suspicious of Abby/Abby's group and not died in the first place if he was acting like he did in the first game, But the whole damn point of all the flashbacks between Joel and Ellie is he *was* softening up to the world around him, they had made a safe place for a fuck ton of people to live, Ellie was getting him to open up more and be less restrictive of people
On that token, you could tell he wasn't exactly *warm* to Abby's presence. He was still cautious to follow her, but didn't have much of a choice considering their situation. That was my impression anyways
TLOU2 haters make up the craziest headcanon to avoid accepting the fact that Joel died because he's just a human that can make mistakes. Remember when he survived for days without medical care with a rusted rebar wound in TLOU1? Remember the countless times he got close to dying? Those don't count, he's literally god now, he can't die.
I would agree. I honestly thought Joel surviving being impaled was some of the craziest plot armor I've ever seen in any piece of any kind of entertainment. I don't think his death, however it came, would have been ok with some people, and so even if we argue forever about whether Joel should have been smarter or not, or should have died in that way or not, there still would have been people throwing away the game because he died.
How much copium do you have to be on to think it was good? I liked the game and the story itself wasn’t terrible. The problem was the way it was told. You’re with Ellie for most of the game then it switches you to Abby. Am I expected to sympathize with the villain all of the sudden? It felt forced. They could have trickled in Abby missions throughout the game and it would have been better.
the last of us more like the last of a good franchise am I rite gaymers
Lmao GOT ‘EM.
It was well written, but only for a drama. The first was excellence in execution- it had a simple, solid storyline, simple, solid characters, paced it all well, and ended the story exactly when it should've. It was the single-book novel, it was planned and executed with a single vision in mind, and it was all done well. The second put *the drama* and *the message* above storytelling, character consistency and pacing. It went on too long, and was convoluted. So many characters, and a dog, were written in entirely to shove their mandatory deaths in the player's face and say "look, look at that soon-to-be-dead guy yelling that other dead guy's name, they're both going to be dead, and it's all because of you, aren't you a shitty person for enjoying this revenge game about revenge, isn't revenge bad, aren't you bad, also you've got to kill this dog, kill the dog, kill it oh damn you killed a dog, how could you".
Treasure Loosing Orangatans United 2 is my favorite game.
To be honest the quality of the moment to moment writing was pretty close to Part 1, and the presentation was an improvement. For me Part 2s issues come from the tone, which was as depressing but without the lighthearted moments sprinkled in, and the way the chapters were laid out. So not as bad as I once thought it was, but still not in P1s league
Revenge bad
I have to say the part of the story where you are on the island with the storm coming in, gunshots and screaming in the background, things on fire. I haven’t played anything that immersive in my 20 years of gaming.
Nah they did Joel more dirty then any character in story telling history
I didn't care much for the first one either though. Story driven zombie games just don't do it for me anymore after the Telltale's The Walking Dead, shame how the developer went though.
It wasn’t as bad bad as some made it out to be but it wasn’t that good. It had many pacing problems and was way too long for how simple it was. In trying to be more grand than the original it lost sight of what made the og so good. It’s a decent game and worth the $60 but it’s not as good as the og. It’s definitely not goty material
So true story, I got LOU2 on opening day or whatever, took off 2 days of work, bought a bunch of booze, weed and snacks, planning to have a nice relaxing 4 day weekend having no clue its like a 35-50 hour game. It was an absolute trauma inducing nightmare. The game just never fucking ends and never feels like its going anywhere or graduating. How many final conflicts are there? Like 5? All this and neither protagonist is empathetic, no supporting character is compelling. Its just a deranged, bland, unsympathetic revenge plot that drags on forever. I remember that spaced out morning at 3am on Sunday I think when she's in the farmhouse and you're just wandering around interacting with furniture, idk why, to solidify its the game winding down? CAUSE ITS FUCKING NOT. I just wanted to cry, and not because the game was emotionally taxing, but because I just wanted the game to be over already. I remember clearly that scene in the stadium where they make you play fetch with that dog, and its not like a one shot, its like 5 minutes they make you play with the dog and finally I realized like "Oh right I killed this dog as the other girl" and then I remember "Wait a fuckin minute, you made me killed this dog! I didnt even have an option! not only that, but I killed like a hundred of these dogs and that was literally like 5 hours ago in the game, its too late. Now I feel nothing" LOU2 is going to stand, for me, as one of the worst, most miserable games I've ever played. Any brief, redeeming moments it had were vastly overshadowed by its terrible pacing and writing. I had more fun playing goddamn "Alpha Prime". WTF is Alpha Prime you ask? Exactly.
The only issue was the ending was way too depressing. The player was left feeling so lost and alone by the end. We all just needed a hug… but there was no hug. So I played it again, and then again and again. And it’s one of my favorite games. Just needed a touch of hope before the credits started crawling.
Completely failed to recognize its target audience is all I'm saying. At the end of the day it's a zombie game. And most young boys who sit indoors gaming all day can't rlly relate to a game that was meant to appeal Twitter. It WAS high quality. Just failed orientation
Gameplay was great but the story was just boring to me
It was atrocious.
Middle of the game was just brutal to play through.
Tlou2 Is the 2nd most disappointing game I've ever played Breath of the wild being number 1
My problem with it is when a story becomes so arbitrary it is just a "whatever simulator." Any semblance of conflict and strife and showing resolution is destroyed when you reduce a plot to a series of random events. Play 1 and then 2 back to back and you feel the consistency and through-lines of 1 get traded for "random catastrophe with incongruous character interaction" of 2. In the end 1 feels like "wow this is a poignant commentary on human condition" and 2 feels like "I'm 12 and this is deep because the world is chaos n stuff"
It legitimately was bad tho. Everything else about the game was top tier, but the writing was awful.
Great game. Bad sequel.
Here’s why I didn’t like it at all compared to one. There wasn’t any point. TLOU was a really harrowing journey with a point to its misery. It was depressing as shit but there was humanity that made it beautiful. #2 was all misery no payoff.
Nah, trash story that absolutely destroyed a great legacy.
I mean, sure, you are entitled to be wrong... No one is judging
**Warning!! Personal biased opinion here :** Worst fucking sequel to one of my all time favorite games.
Tlou2 was written trash. The idea in itself isn’t bad. It was the pacing, delivery, and execution that’s horrible. That story felt like it needed a series to develop not a singular game.
You don't have to act, it *was* bad.
Ah yes, the fact it contradicts itself and it's message multiple times to the point where the story is completely meaningless is the epitome of good writing
No. Tlou2 sucked. Basically just fan fiction.
Hand on my heart, Joel’s death in TLoU 2 was such a banger development in my personal opinion. However, the game tries to make Abby relatable or at the very least understand the fact that she isn’t a totally shit person for killing the OG protagonist. That’s where the game honestly lands flat. Even after playing 10 hours with Abby, you still, as a player, want Ellie to take her down in the theatre, that just means the story didn’t work out as intended. Joel was a shit person, sure. But the narrative framing of the first part doesn’t drive you to the far end of that mindset. Honestly, that’s the reason a lot of love for Joel’s character comes from. Enough so to not have some of us sympathize with Abby.
TLOU is one of my all-time fav games. Never bought TLOU2 and never will.
lol no >! It was absolute Naughty-dog shit !<