‘The Last of Us Part II’ is The Most Disappointing Video Game I Have Ever Played: Here’s Why
The Last of Us Part II is one of the toughest gaming experiences I’ve ever endured, and writing about that experience is equally difficult. I loved the original Last of Us despite the story far outshining the gameplay, but thought it didn’t need a sequel. The ambiguity of Ellie’s final word, “Okay,” before the credits rolled earned The Last of Us a top spot for best video game endings of all time. Despite my fondness for that nearly perfect ending, I immediately lapped up the announcements and press events and trailers leading up to the release of The Last of Us Part II, for it’s so easy to want more from an intellectual property you care a lot about. Along the way to the release of Part II, I avoided ubiquitous plot leaks but was aware of the controversy and backlash from those who had been exposed to the story details. It was the most anticipation I had felt towards a game since Death Stranding launched, and that’s what made the gut-punch of playing it unbearable.
I don’t hate The Last of Us Part II for the commonly cited reasons that circulate around the internet. It’s disgusting that Naughty Dog’s members who worked on the game have received hateful and threatening messages in response to this game. Furthermore, the sort of hate that is being leveled at the game itself is primarily homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic in nature – attitudes beneath contempt. Unfortunately, that disturbing and abusive behavior has been conflated by Naughty Dog – and Neil Druckmann in particular – with respectful criticism of the game itself, notably the writing and pacing issues that I personally found grating. Moments in this game are exceptional, thus the devil deserves to be given its due before exorcising it.
What ‘The Last of Us Part II’ Gets Right
The first thing to be said in praise of The Last of Us Part II is the staggering attention to detail throughout the entirety of the game. Naughty Dog is nearly unrivaled in environmental creation – Uncharted: The Lost Legacy being a paragon of this proficiency – and thus it is no surprise that The Last of Us Part II lives and breathes design sophistication. This sophistication most notably carries over into animations, with an unbelievable amount of contextual reactions of the game’s multiple characters such as Dina, Ellie’s partner, scavenging a shop alongside the player instead of just wandering about. Simple gestures like Ellie covering her breath in tense situations similarly sell the protagonist’s character model as well. When scrutinizing the technical components of this sequel, practically any praise that could be aimed at well-executed game design could be found within The Last of Us Part II. It stands at the peak of what the Playstation 4 has been capable of, completely dwarfing its predecessor in every conceivable way – apart from narrative.
The gameplay has also been refined in ways that address nearly every critique that I harbor towards the original game. Part II’s gunplay is smoother and tighter. Enemies respond in more tactful ways, flanking you and using dogs to help sniff out your location. The weapon variety has been expanded. You no longer have to manually craft a shiv, since Ellie upgraded to a permanent pocket knife. Even the notorious Naughty Dog crate puzzles have been drastically reduced; when they are present, they actually take a bit of quick thinking as opposed to just pointing an analog stick in a direction. From top to bottom, the mechanics of traversal and combat have been completely polished and upgraded from the original game. This is easily the most fluid gameplay system that Naughty Dog has ever authored.
I also found the first four to six hours to be precisely what I wanted from a sequel to The Last of Us, narratively speaking. The interactions between Joel and Ellie are at the heart of why I fell in love with the original game, and the sequel’s introduction expands on how that relationship has developed in the wake of Joel’s lie at the end of the original game. In Part II, I became immediately invested in the new characters, the town of Jackson, and the ways in which Ellie had matured. Though I would have preferred no sequel, these first few hours are more than I could have hoped for in a follow-up effort. But here’s where things get complicated when parsing criticism from vitriol in the discussion around The Last of Us Part II.
Without being exposed to the leaks about the story, I deeply knew that Joel must die in the sequel. I haven’t felt that sort of narrative certainty since predicting Dumbledore’s death in the Harry Potter series. It just brought appropriate closure in the same way: men who did morally objectionable things in the name of their conception of righteousness eventually facing the consequences. Unlike many people I have seen online, I was not angry at the writers for killing off Joel. In fact, the brutality and bluntness of the scene in which he is murdered is incredibly powerful and well-executed. Troy Baker has repeatedly referred to this scene as one of the most important in his acting career, and rightly so given the gravity of Joel’s gut-wrenching demise. I don’t intend to dismiss the emotional reaction of those who took Joel’s death as a surprise, but that narrative decision is not a criticism that I hold towards this game.
Furthermore, I think one of the oft-laid criticisms against this game’s pacing is overblown. It is inelegantly handled, to be fair, but some of the flashbacks provided against the game’s parallel narrative are the best scenes in the game. When thinking back on the original Last of Us, the giraffe scene is perhaps the most standout moment from the entire experience (sans its perfect introduction and ending) precisely because it’s a moment of levity and hope amidst the bleak morass of a post-apocalyptic world. Through a certain flashback, The Last of Us Part II takes the emotional energy of that giraffe scene and amplifies it to a degree that I didn’t think were yet possible in video games.
The Museum Flashback
The scene in question that I cannot praise enough takes place in a flashback to Ellie’s birthday. Joel takes Ellie on a surprise trip to an abandoned museum that has been overgrown in the many years since humans tended to it. Along the way, Joel and Ellie tease each other, play little pranks, and get kindhearted revenge on each other for doing so. Ellie boldly climbs up a giant dinosaur statue as Joel cautions her to be careful; she dives off the top with the energy of a kid – something we seldom see in Ellie throughout either game. Along the way, there is excellent banter between both characters, revealing the true bond underneath the distrust that actively plagues their relationship in Part II.
The museum scene reaches its zenith in a moment of marvel, where Joel has knowingly led Ellie to a space exhibit, featuring an empty space capsule amongst other things. Ellie dons an astronaut helmet before they both enter the space probe. But before Ellie can properly express her full appreciation for how meaningful this birthday has been to her, Joel reveals a cassette tape that he has procured. On this tape is a recording of the countdown to launching a rocket into space. As Ellie closes her eyes, listening to this recording within her astronaut helmet, the camera begins to shake as if the rocket’s engines were truly shooting them off the planet. Reflected in her astronaut visor is the light of what would be fire from the rockets before they reached the vast emptiness of space. The tape ends. Joel and Ellie exchange a few words, but it is clear that Joel has bent over backwards to demonstrate how important Ellie is to him. It is equally clear that Ellie recognizes his paternal efforts.
The reason the museum scene is my favorite scene in The Last of Us Part II by a landslide is because it focuses on what I loved about the original game: the dynamic relationship between Joel and Ellie. By killing Joel within the first quarter of the game, this relationship becomes entirely relegated to sparse flashbacks in sequences where Ellie is the playable character. Though I have no bones to pick with the writers for killing off Joel, I do think they did so a bit soon given the length of Part II. I knew this game was about Ellie’s story, not Joel’s, but Part II completely pulls the rug underneath that assumption. Instead, this story is equally about Abby, Joel’s murderer who was not present in the first game. And thus half of Part II is spent in a way that felt completely unrelated from the things I fell in love with while playing the original game.
How Abby Overstays Her Welcome
Abby’s presence in the story returns us to the distinction between whiny incels and critics who make substantial points about the game’s writing. Abby has unfortunately been at the center of much of the aforementioned disgusting behavior online, leading to actress Laura Bailey receiving death threats, amongst other heinous things. Gamers upset that Part II featured a deuteragonist that has more muscle than they do have lambasted Naughty Dog for a number of nonsensical things, best explained with ridicule by Jim Sterling in a recent video on the topic. This gross treatment of her character aside, there is an additional layer of criticism to shed off before reaching the heart of my problems with Abby in Part II.
The other issue that I do not share with many players who lament Abby’s core presence in The Last of Us Part II is the fact of having to play as Joel’s killer. Many people who were upset by Joel’s early demise in Part II share the belief that playing as Abby – the murderer of a beloved character – made them hate their time with the game itself. I applaud the boldness of putting the player in the shoes of two parallel protagonists, one of which players of the original game have every motivation to despise. I don’t have a fundamental problem with playing someone I actively detest if it serves a profound narrative purpose. Unfortunately, the writers at Naughty Dog took this interesting concept and decided to expand it into half of their game.
Revenge is Bad, M’kay?
So much of The Last of Us Part II can be boiled down to “revenge is bad.” Joel’s actions at the end of the first game created a cycle of revenge that is completely destructive throughout Part II’s narrative. But instead of adhering to subtlety in pursuing that theme against revenge, the game insists on beating the drum that revenge is bad until the credits roll. From the moment the game took control away from Ellie and instead presented me with Abby’s story, I knew what trick the writers were trying to pull. By spending time in the shoes of Joel’s murderer, eventually we would realize that she’s a human being with relationships and motivations all of her own. In reaching the end of the story, in theory, we would feel a deep inner conflict about Ellie’s impetus to take revenge on behalf of Joel. But the problem with The Last of Us Part II is that it takes this idea of empathizing with a perceived antagonist and completely forgets about Ellie for the majority of the remaining gameplay. It also fails to connect the player’s prolonged experience in Abby’s shoes to the eventually reconnected player relationship to Ellie’s.
I have repeatedly mulled over how Abby’s character could better fit into Part II in a way that wouldn’t cause resentment from me. Initially, I just wanted less Abby. When playing Part II, I kept hoping that the next destination Abby reached would be when I finally regained control of Ellie – the reason I was playing this game in the first place. But repeatedly – and this is a problem with the game as a whole – just when it seems like the end destination is in sight, something goes wrong and you have to work your way around a new route, extending the chapter further. I felt like I had nearly been drowned by the amount of time spent with Abby by the end, so naturally my mind came up with a few ways that this would have sat better with me.
How Could Abby’s Character Better Fit Into ‘Part II’?
I first imagined the game more frequently cutting between Ellie’s and Abby’s perspective, taking the “Seattle: Day 1” pacing and bouncing between characters almost like mirroring episodes. As explored in a roundtable discussion on the Epilogue Gaming Twitch channel, this pacing wouldn’t give the same impact as it eventually attempts to by showing us where the player’s journey with Abby is going. I also imagined us having more time with Abby up front, perhaps a cold open where we play as Abby leading up until the point where she kills Joel, and then control is released for Ellie’s character. While I love the idea of the narrative bait-and-switch, I don’t see how this could have ever been greenlit as an idea. A final idea was to imagine Abby’s character as a sort of spinoff in the vein of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, devoting a full game in the Last of Us universe to this character that the developers clearly had such a passion for. Maybe Abby should have been the protagonist of The Last of Us Part III, assuming that is in development.
Playing as Abby was ultimately annoying, not because she felt out of place in the story, but because she felt out of place in the game. Part of the core gameplay loop in The Last of Us is to scavenge for resources, requiring you to attend to every nook and cranny within each environment. The positive feedback to this gameplay loop consists in upgrading core weapons for your character. For the first dozen or so hours of Part II, I was fully invested in maximizing all of Ellie’s arsenal, going far out of my way to ensure I unlocked safes and investigated abandoned buildings to achieve this. Then the game takes Ellie away and you then are tasked with upgrading an entirely new character from scratch. This was the fundamental problem I had with the game’s decision to break the story apart in the way that they chose to, in that I felt like my previous progression within the game itself had been undermined by the developers. This feeling of my efforts being undermined contributed no doubt to my annoying impatience at the sheer scope of how much time Naughty Dog wanted to devote to this new character.
Ellie’s Abrupt and Unconvincing Change of Heart
One of the major problems that the player’s time with Abby presents narratively is the question of Ellie’s eventual decision to free Abby at the end of the game rather than killing her outright. As players, there are plenty of moments with Abby that engender a kind of empathy and sense that she may not deserve death. Barring the maternal behavior Abby displays towards Lev when freed, paralleling the relationship between Joel and Ellie from the first game, Ellie has no explicit reason to revoke her revenge in this final act. Abby has killed Joel, Ellie’s father figure, and has given her post-traumatic stress that rends apart her family with Dina. Ellie has left everything behind to take revenge on Abby, hunting down her entire crew of friends, murdering hundreds of people (whose lives are equally complex as Abby’s, as evidenced by the fact that these enemies are called out by name when killed) just to finally finish Abby off. Sure, Ellie seeing her mortal enemy, the source of her psychological distress, essentially crucified and emaciated up on a beach could make Ellie reconsider her actions. But there is no on-screen justification for this sudden change of heart, no conversation between characters, no evidence that Ellie’s past actions could be so abruptly halted in this moment. Only flashing memories of Joel.
The game attempts to address this lack of revenge at the finale by pitting Ellie in a violent brawl that results in Abby being stabbed and nearly drowned. Ellie’s flashbacks of Joel are meant to convey that, in this moment, she regains some of her humanity, some of the good that she saw in Joel, however vile his actions were. This ending just needed a few more narrative threads connecting Ellie’s actions and the player’s time spent with Abby together. Flashbacks cheapen the tenuous narrative justification for Ellie’s reaction here, and thus the tragedy of the game’s ending didn’t land as powerfully as it might have. I can’t escape the feeling that this game attempted to address the issue of ludonarrative dissonance so commonly held against Naughty Dog’s other games, but this game’s ending seems to have completely forgotten that aim to unite gameplay with storytelling. Here, the player has motivation to view Abby more complexly than the hundreds of people Ellie has killed to get here, but Ellie lacks that perspective entirely. And as a result of the (unfortunately) fun gameplay, it seems the developers entirely forgot about that human cost expended along the way towards Abby. This is a video game after all, ignoring the consequences of Ellie’s intermittently murderous actions. Thus when the drum finally stopped beating, “Revenge is bad,” there was no lesson to be learned, only relief that it was over. And I was left feeling resentful because of how close the game’s early hours came to perfection. I was floored that I felt no emotion at the game’s final cutscenes considering how invested I initially was.
I Wish ‘The Last of Us Part II’ Was Never Made
I hated my time with The Last of Us Part II. But this hatred reminded me of the aphorism that familiarity breeds contempt. I had spent seven years loving the dynamic relationship between Joel and Ellie, and though I knew it was going to be ripped apart, I didn’t know how little time I’d be spending with that relationship or those characters in the sequel. Instead, I was forced to care about someone that I never quite grew to like, spend far more time with them than was necessary for the moral arc of the narrative, and accept an ending for that character which felt flaccid. Along the way, I was tunneled through repetitive combat arenas that, no matter how well dressed, completely failed to reflect the moral considerations that the narrative attempts to establish.
Reporter Jason Schreier got himself in hot water with the pointedly vague but provocative tweet about Part II, “Video games are too long.” Actor Troy Baker responded in kind with a bizarre Roosevelt quote railing against the role that critics have in the industry. While it must be maddening to be on the receiving end of online vitriol for a video game you’ve worked on, I happen to agree with Schreier on this one, despite having a massive reverence for Baker’s acting abilities: video games are too long. The Last of Us Part II would be a better story if it was a third shorter, many moments of which could be trimmed from the time spent playing as Abby. Part II is frustrating precisely because of how much it got right. The narrative mistakes this game made completely soured my experience, causing me to sell my copy immediately after playing – something I had never done before. There is nothing for me to return to with this game, which as someone who has replayed the original game many times, is heartbreaking.
Undoubtedly, The Last of Us Part II will be fondly remembered as the Playstation 4’s swan song in the way that the original Last of Us game was for the Playstation 3. Purely in terms of technical achievement, Part II is a must-play for owners of the current generation consoles, and our own Andy Webb reviewed this game as “groundbreaking.” But in terms of narrative, I almost wish that Part II was never made, that the original game would forever live on as lightning in a bottle, the one zombie game that rose to the cream of the crop in an overly saturated genre. And though the sequel has moments of greatness that occasionally top the original, Part II completely outstayed its welcome for me, leaving me cold at the idea of any future Last of Us games.
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