 |
| Expect to see this scene in the game, but heavily altered and very misleading.... |
SPOILERS AHEAD. READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION
Alright, now that the warning is out of the way let's get to the point. This game feels like an incoherent mess.
I hated how Joel's death was handled. I understand how brutal the world of The Last of Us is, but this is still a work of fiction and the death of a beloved protagonist must be taken as to not anger a fan base. By that, I mean that a death must be handled in a way that best suites the character in a dignified way. Sure, it can be argued that Joel was not much of a hero to begin with let alone that he possibly doomed mankind by the end of the first game. However, through the 15 hour journey that we spent with him in the first game it's impossible not to feel sympathy for the poor guy. We see him lose his first daughter and then here he is traveling with a young girl across the country progressively seeing her as his own daughter by the time the game is over.
Then, we probably seem him for a total of less than 30 minutes before he is brutally executed with a gold club. As if he wasn't all that important.
Look, if Joel was going to die I would have been fine with it. I'm never against killing a protagonist as long as it serves importance to the plot and it's handled properly, but there was no buildup nor "goodbye" for Joel. We don't get those buildups until after his death has occurred.
This leads up to my second point: the organization of the story.
I did not like playing 10 hours of Ellie and 10 hours of Abby. By the time you reach Ellie's conclusion before playing as Abby, you already will feel burned out. Then, having to play 10 hours as a hated character in order to reach the present time in the story is just unnecessary.
If they were going to do this, they could have easily swapped back and fourth between Ellie and Abby, so that there stories would coincide in a much more fluid pace. Splitting up the story in two was just a terrible design choice.
I get why they did it. However, I see no reason why I should feel a sense of guilt over Abby's loss. She's no better than Joel. In the flashback with Abby and her father, Abby literally told her father that she WOULD NOT WANT her father to perform the surgery on her if she was in Ellie's position. How can you possibly want players to empathize with Abby if she literally had that same thought process as Joel!?
By the end, we see that revenge is such a forced theme here. Ellie loses everything, Abby got her revenge and is now off to live a life with Lev with the same relationship reminiscent of Joel and Ellie. I have a lot to complain about the ending because Ellie deserved so much better. You don't just go on a revenge quest for months and just let it go at the very last minute. Let alone she went on this revenge quest in order to stop her nightmares and alleviate her PTSD. This was just a dumb plot device.
It would have made a more potent ending if Ellie got her revenge then lost everything! It would have made for a more ambiguous ending if Ellie did the right thing to avenge Joel and what becomes of her as a result of her vengeance.
In conclusion, I don't believe The Last of Us 2 is a bad game. Its gameplay is a more refined version of the first game. If you liked the gameplay from the first game, you'll love this one. However, the story is just a mess that could have been told in a different manner and different choices could have been made.
The trailers have lied to us all. I'm expecting some overly angry fans to file lawsuits against Naughty Dog over the trailers vs the final game.
Till Next Time!!
