The Last Of Us 2: Electric Boogaloo [OR: How not to make a sequel]

      

This expression accurately depicts how I feel about this game.

And so it begins...

Alright, this is a review that I am not going to enjoy writing but it has to happen for me to express all the thoughts and emotions that I have about The Last Of Us 2. I hope you know this is not going to be a very pretty review as I have some not so kind things to say about the story in the game and the direction they took the franchise. I also will warn you again that this review is going to be chock full of every spoiler that could possibly be told about this game, I am not going to hold back in the content I discuss in this review! It has been long enough for most people who want to play this game to have played it, because it does only have a specific target audience. I'm talking about people who love the first game of course, but sadly this game is only a disservice to those fans.

The game begins simple enough, Joel and Ellie are still living in Jackson City with Joel's brother Tommy. However they have grown distant, and you aren't really given any inclination as to why, though it is safe to assume it is because of the events unfolding at the end of Last Of Us Part 1. In case you need a refresher on that game, it ends with Joel making the choice to either let Ellie be killed to possibly make a cure for the Cordyceps virus or to save her and kill the fireflies, he chooses the latter option because he formed such a strong bond with Ellie after losing his daughter at the beginning of the outbreak. He murders every single firefly in the facility and then chooses to lie to Ellie about the whole situation, saying there are multiple immune people and the whole project may as well be pointless. Flash forward to the start of this game, and you get a distant Ellie who doesn't trust Joel, let alone much of anyone, and a Joel who's just trying to get Ellie to love him like he does. A promising enough start really, if only the game could keep this kind of story going, one that makes sense and is connected in line with the events of the original game. It continues to introduce you to the life that Ellie leads in Jackson City, all her friends, her girlfriend Dina, etc etc. You learn that their town barkeep is a bigot for some reason (but you won't know the reason until the very end of the game almost), and it's all quite okay. The characters are just okay. Everything about this game is very okay. 

But then things aren't okay.

Alright, this is where I'm gonna start really spoiling stuff because the introduction of the game is very slow and full of all kinds of quite meaningless dialogue honestly. I feel like a lot of the characters in this game carry very little weight or character in general. They all kind of just exist around Ellie and Joel in this intro, and that's how they carry on the rest of the game. They pop in and pop out just to exchange pretty basic dialogue and kind of just exist. It takes so god damn long for any of them to mean anything, but that's just one of the problems with this game's story. Flash forward past all the introductory junk and we're introduced to a girl named Abby, and her boyfriend Owen. We're not told who these people are, what their intentions are, or what they even mean to Joel and Ellie. We're put in control of these seemingly random people and given a bit of dialogue about them searching for someone who fits the description of a certain fan beloved smuggler named Joel (Full disclaimer: I'm not one of the fans who loves Joel to death, I think he's a flawed character and can't change), and then you start to realize that maybe these people have not so great intentions for who they're after. You play through a bunch of combat and puzzles and whatnot and then eventually Abby runs into Joel and Tommy out on patrol and they follow her back to her camp without even raising the question of who she is at all, which is a huge red flag to me. You're really telling me that after all these years of knowing how to survive in the apocalypse and trusting very few people they let their guard down in this one scenario? Seems kind of fishy to me, but it happens. And, well, when they find out who Joel is, they bash his head in with a golf club brutally, right in front of Ellie who is there to save Joel. And just like that, 2 or 3 hours into the game, Joel is fuckin dead. Not only is he dead, but they bashed his damn head in with a golf club and made Ellie watch I mean damn. And that really sets the tone for Last of Us 2! Lots and lots and lots and lots of dark stuff and depression. 

Of course, Ellie doesn't take this killing lightly and decides it is now her sole purpose in life to hunt down the people responsible for the killing of Joel. Of course this takes her on a very long journey to many many places to get revenge on all these people who killed Joel. However through the course of the game you're pretty much told that all of this revenge is bad. Like the whole game is built around guilt tripping you about the people and things you are murdering wantonly. They scripted a game that is entirely a revenge story, and in this linear game, they are telling you that your choices are bad and you should feel bad. A game with no free agency that is written to be like a Fallout game or some shit, with moral choices and free agency that makes sense, with a linear game it is nonsense to the highest degree. Ellie goes across the entire state of Seattle on a mission to kill every last one of the people who were involved in Joels death but she has no real motivation or reason to do so. It is shown quite clearly that she has grown away from Joel, that she can not forgive him for making her life worthless as she sees it. She can not forgive him for not using her as a martyr and trying the cure route, which she thinks would have given her life true meaning. Throughout the course of the story in flashbacks you learn all of this information, but they are very much out of order and could have been arranged in a much more cohesive manner. Basically as the story progresses, you will learn more and more information that literally just further makes the narrative confusing as a whole, the entire plot of the story begins making very little sense. 

I think the worst part about this game is probably the fact that it really targets only the people who thought Joel was a patron saint in the last game, and that his choice was truly the only right one to make. This game assumes you absolutely love Joel, and you think he was an amazing person and a true father figure that Ellie should look up to. It assumes that you didn't see why Joel's option in the last game was a really bad decision, one he took in a selfish and vain attempt to have a second chance at having a daughter. Joel's death does not justify the rampage that Ellie goes on in this game. The impetus for her quest is weak and shallow, it holds no water and it has no ground to stand on. This would make sense if Ellie was shown to have any kind of love for Joel in the beginning, or even really in the flashbacks, but really all that shows is her animosity toward him. If she hates Joel so much, why then is she inclined to trek all the way to fuckin Seattle to hunt down these would be killers. It makes no sense. The characters in this game say one thing, then do another, they don't line up at all with what they are saying. Emotions are a delicate thing, and they are not handled well in this game at all. You can't tell what anyone's motivation is because they're all too busy giving hundred line monologues in slow drawn out cut-scenes.  I just don't understand what the motivation for Ellie even is in this game given the events of the first game and the intro. Anyhow, eventually you learn that Dina is pregnant, and then shit ensues. You kill all of Abbies friends without even a care in the world, barely extracting the minimum amount of information from them, and basically Ellie becomes Joel. 

Ellie goes on murder spree to get revenge for someone who gave her life the absolute worst possible outcome. And then you become Abby when she's holding Ellie at gunpoint in her base. And you also learn through the course of this mess of a game that Joel killed Abby's father, which is why she killed Joel. Abby's father was the lead doctor of the Fireflies and the only one who could make a cure. So Abby's killing of Joel is justified. Joel killed someone she loved, so it only makes sense I guess? That's the problem I have with this game. Everyone in this game is just set to revenge mode to the extreme. There is no nuance with this game, there is no subtlety. There is just revenge, revenge, and more revenge. Also they pull the damn pregnancy twist 3 times. They even have you kill a pregnant woman and then make you feel bad about it 8 hours later in the game. And that leads me to the next big problem with this game, the pacing. 

The pacing of a turtle on crack

This game has no pacing. There is no direction in this game at all, it's sad but it's true. The story is told in a completely out of order fashion with flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. The flashbacks half of the time will be a reference to something you did about 6 to 9 hours ago in the game and you likely forgot about doing it because it was so long ago. The game is very long compared to the first game. You could fit two Last of Us Part 1's in this game's length, and all that seems to have done is make the cutscenes make very little sense. You spend so much time just wandering around and fighting in this game that by the time you get to a flashback about someone you killed that's supposed to make you feel bad about it you just don't give a fuck anymore. The game has no sense of what order to tell a story in like at all. If you want my advice, here's what I would have done. I would have put the flashbacks about Abby interlaced through the story right after you, idk, kill the person in the damn flashback? Like you go in as Ellie, but then as Abby right afterward, so you can feel a bit of humanization, you can feel bad about the people you're killing. The director clearly wanted you to feel bad about these people you're killing, but the pacing makes it impossible for that impact to actually even take full effect at all. This game is vastly inferior to the first game on pacing, and by the end of it you can really tell how much of it is just thrown into it out of order. There are so many slow moments in this game with boring dialogue, just meaningless basic stuff. Like all the relationships, all the drama, all the over the top monologues, the're all in this game. This game is a soap opera full of people you don't care about until the game tries to make you care about them 9 hours later. It's absolutely horrendous to think this came from the same person who wrote the first game.

The game doesn't get better as it goes either, the more and more the game goes on the more you can tell of its weaknesses in the story department. The more and more Ellie goes off the deep end of revenge fueled by pure hatred for someone who killed Joel, the more I went off the deep end on this game. I told myself they couldn't possibly do this to Ellie, they couldn't possibly make her into just a Joel Jr because that's the laziest thing you could do when you kill a character. I mean let's be honest, you kill someone to kill them, not to recreate them through someone else. But that's what has happened here. Ellie has come full circle and only become exactly what she hated about Joel. She's become enraged, she's become full of anger, she just wants revenge. She's all about the ends justifying the means and that's all that matters. Violence is always the answer, and that's disgusting. And when she is given her chance to live happily ever after, does she take it? No, no she doesn't. She spits on it and decides revenge is all she needs to be happy. She could take her life with Dina, and her baby, and live on and forgive Abby for taking out her revenge. But no, she goes after that woman again, even after killing all her friends, just to come back and have fucking nobody, and then the game is over. Jesus Christ, what a bleak ending. But also not nearly as impactful as the first game.  There is nothing here that is nearly as emotional as the first game. There are so many characters and stories going on it's impossible to keep track of it all. There is conflicting information everywhere and the plot device is very stupid for a linear game. This is a game that assumes humanity is driven entirely by an intense need to get revenge, and it sounds ridiculous but that is the core of this entire games story. Revenge being bad. Revenge is bad guys. I know that. Revenge is bad. Visuals are great though.

So, let's wrap this review up here huh. Characters: Barely passable. Story: Out of order on a runaway train. Visuals: Absolutely poppin, some of the best I've seen on PS4. So if I had to assign this game a rating based on just that, I think I would probably give it a 6 or a 7 out of 10. But I'm not really into assigning numerical values since it's imprecise and doesn't give a good enough message.  But basically I'm pretty disappointed with this game as a sequel to the first game. I love the first Last of Us game, and think it had potential for a great sequel, unfortunately it's not the game we were given. This game is flawed, and those flaws really outweigh the stories good elements. If it was told in a more cohesive manner this game could be amazing, and then worthy of the Last of Us title. But, for now, it's just Ellie's Revenge Simulator 2020 to me...

A sequel should build upon its predecessor in some meaningful way, and I do not feel that this game does that. It does however manage to shit upon all the work that was done in the first game. I must applaud them for completely and utterly destroying all the work in that first game to make this basic revenge plot, bravo!