I get it’s not a perfect game and I understand some of the criticisms that people have but I see such a hatred for it when honestly I didn’t think it was that bad, it was fun and I thought the story and characters were at least interesting enough to finish, it didn’t always stick the landing but I thought it was a good game. Does anyone else like this game or is it just universally considered bad?
Last of Us 2 was a perfectly fine game, but it was terrible as a narrative.
The characters were shallow suckbags of nothing but terrible people with no real background, motivation, character or even decent voice acting.
The story was atrocious, didn’t have a real conclusion, didn’t even stick to its own messaging and was so blatant about its insistence on certain themes while failing to make a real statement on them that it was almost like the anti-fishing lobby beating people with rancid fish because “fishing bad”, despite not seeing the irony in using rancid fish to make that statement. Basically, it relied on having played the first game to even care about anything happening, rather than being its own story that was just connected to the previous, since the death of Joel, beatdown of Tommy, and Ellie’s nonsensically OTT rage about Joel’s death only have impact if you played the first game. Even Abby’s entire reason for killing Joel only matters if you played the first game, and her father (and flashbacks) only makes the Fireflies look even dumber in retrospect before he gets his brains splattered at the end of the first game.
It was so wishy-washy on its primary theme, revenge and the pointlessness of violence, that it flip-flopped between saying “This person (Abbey) committing heinous violence is absolutely justified in doing so and is a paragon of virtue” and “This person (Ellie) is the reincarnation of the hate-baby offspring of Satan and Hitler and everything she does is unjustified malevolence because ‘Violence bad’”.
Lev was not a character. Their entire existence was identity politics, and regardless of your stance on such things, that alone does not make a good character. The reasons for their abandonment are nonsensical, the society that abandoned them is rife with double standards (Yara is selected to be a soldier, but Lev was selected to be a wife despite the tribe being “ultra-traditional” in gender roles), and to top it off, Lev has awful voice acting.
The game tried way too hard to make emotional moments, but failed spectacularly because it had to endear players to Abbey, whose first act is to kill a fan-favourite character, and because none of the characters feel like real people. Reveals like “Ellie shot a pregnant woman” have no impact, because that woman is only on-screen for like, 5 minutes total. We barely know her, so who cares if she dies?
Naughty Dog said you wouldn’t have to kill dogs, but then force you to kill dogs in quicktime events you can’t avoid.
etc…
The gameplay is fine, the graphics are fine, but the story and everything that comes with it is horrible. Plus, there’s also all the weird, creepy, gross, downright abusive, and otherwise borderline reprehensible behaviour of Naughty Dog and staff during the dev process.
Cool assertions. Most of what you said there is just being mad that the story is tied to the first game then just saying x is bad, y is bad, z is bad as if it’s true because you said so. Most of the examples you have given are just weirdly specific issues for you, not necessarily problems. I just disagree that Lev wasn’t a character. Just because you have issues with them and want to make their presence political doesn’t mean it’s true.
You also demonstrated you don’t understand the story by saying the themes were wishy-washy. Nobody was glorifying Abby’s killing of Joel. Killing was never a positive in any context. Not when Joel did it, not when Ellie does it, not when Abby does it.
To Abby and most others beyond Ellie and Joel’s brother, Joel was a murderous shit bag - yet because if the interactions with her, the playerbase forgave all that and treated him like he was a decent, good person. Abby put a mirror up to them and said “why are you pretending this man who killed my father is good” and it made people very uncomfortable realizing how pliable their moral structure is. The story shows how everyone involved are immensely flawed and broken people and the cycle had to be broken somewhere.
Your reading of this whole game is just a miss.
Would you like to offer an actual rebuttal, or are you just going to be snide because you don’t like what I said and can’t actually offer any argument to it?
Lev’s entire character was “I am trans and everyone hates me for it”. Personally I don’t give a damn, be whoever you want, but one, singular trait doesn’t actually make a character good just because it’s a hot-button issue. It’s a very common trope that bad writers use to justify a bad character, “just make them be LGBTQ+ because any negativity towards them is (x)phobic”.
The singular, sole functions that Lev has in the story are to raise issues of identity and gender politics, and to further sanctify Abbey in the eyes of the player by giving her a naïve child to look after in a poor attempt at the Joel/Ellie dynamic from the first game. Their literal and actual character arc was “I want to be accepted for being trans by the people, more specifically my mother, who actively want to kill me for being trans, and actively put everyone in danger so they have to pay attention to the fact I’m trans by attempting suicide by stupidity (going back to his mother)”.
The primary theme of the game is “Violence and revenge are pointless pursuits that accomplish nothing”, and yet it plays Abbey’s entire story off as “Abbey is the good guy, and is fully justified in taking revenge against Joel, and in any and all violence she perpetrates on others”. Because she’s a new protagonist (with Ellie functionally being an antagonist), the story needs to endear the player to her, but the only way the game actually does this is by making her a virtuous and pure person, no matter who she kills, how she kills them, and how many people she kills. The story actually has to create nonsense reasons, which further lay out the Fireflies to be braindead morons, so that Abbey’s father (who, scientifically speaking was a terrible scientist) was a completely indisputable “good guy messiah”, just for Abbey to have more justification to kill Joel beyond “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”, and make a weak attempt at lessening the attachment people had to Joel by making him a worse person in retrospect through information that he literally couldn’t possibly have had to make decisions from.
Take a look at the way the game actually portrays Abbey’s violence against Ellie’s. Ellie is largely portrayed as vicious, merciless, brutal, sickening, and in many cases outright spiteful. Abbey, with exception to Joel’s death, is nearly universally portrayed as not only in the moral right, but almost always quick, clean, and critically, in self-defence. She only actually attacks Ellie’s group once after Joel, and only in retaliation for killing her adulterous lover and her dog and a pregnant woman, and the only kill she actually makes in that attack is Jesse, who dies instantly from a shot to the head by surprise. She literally lets Ellie go at the end of that sequence and lets Tommy and Dina go because she’s portrayed as “merciful” after being interrupted by Lev.
Even Abbey’s betrayal of WLF is portrayed as morally correct, because it’s done in defence of Lev, and Abbey does everything she can to prevent killing before WLF starts opening fire on her.
Ellie is the one to go after Abbey again, despite the situation being over, not the reverse, further laying the “Abbey good/Ellie bad” plot more firmly into the stone it’s beating the player over the head with.
The game can’t pretend that it’s saying “violence is bad” when one of the characters is nearly always being portrayed as fully justified in the violence they’re committing. It flip-flops between “violence bad” and “violence is justified” between Abbey and Ellie and refuses to come to an actual conclusion on either side, because the game ends with “I won’t take revenge on the nearly-dead Abbey… No wait, I totally will… She bit my fingers off, so I won’t” and only has actual consequences for Ellie, the character portrayed as an outright villain through the whole thing, who pulled a 540 kickflip to reverse, then unreverse, then reverse again on her decision in the span of 30 seconds for literally no reason.
But no, go on and tell me how this is a “bad read” because you said so without actually giving any examples or reasoning yourself.