Warning, long-winded video game commentary afoot. Because I’ve not got any books to review at the moment, and this game comes close to qualifying given how it tells its story and—surprisingly—the quality of the writing.
It’s not often I find myself so utterly torn on a media product, but "The Last of Us Part II" is a very unique beast, for better and worse. At the most basic level, it’s “an eye for an eye leaves the world blind: the video game.” Put in more explicitly pop-cultural terms, it’s the personification of the “well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my actions” meme. And I’m legitimately back and forth on whether it’s one of the greatest and most engrossing gaming experiences I’ve had or a despicable embracing of all things torture porn.
Or both.
Oh, and I have no idea how, in the sweet fuckery up above, this game didn’t net the very, very rare scarlet letter of an AO rating. Because there is violence in this game the likes of which I’ve not seen. Not to mention nudity, shown-not-implied sex (that wasn’t embarrassingly bad or unintentionally funny looking), and what I think is the first instance of c*nt I’ve heard uttered in a game. If the first game in this series was PG-13, this is a hard R.
To the good: Much of what was reported in the leak that happened well ahead of release appears to have been false.
from this point on, full spoilers
Yes, Joel dies, and quite horribly (it’s the inciting incident for this awful revenge quest that you wish you could stop and walk away from at a hundred different points along the way). Ellie, however, does not; nor is the trans character, Lev, the villain—or even a villain—as was also mentioned in the leak. Yes, Lev is deadnamed at one point by a bunch of cruel, homicidal religious zealots (which felt in character for them, but as I myself don’t have trauma surrounding my given name I’m not going to comment on that except to say that I expected it to be far worse, again, from what was reported in the leaks), but they—Naughty Dog—also managed to not be explicitly transphobic by never wavering from he/him pronouns, even when discussing how Lev was to be a wife of one of Haven’s warriors before they (Lev and Yara) fled. And neither Ellie nor Abby is ever for a second phased or bothered by Lev being trans.
Abby. That’s something worth digging into. ND managed to pull a Kojima a la Metal Gear Solid 2 with this game, and I’m shocked it hasn’t been more widely spoiled by this point. That is, you’re only playing as Ellie (for the most part) for the first half of the game; the second half is all Abby, a newcomer with very strong emotional ties to the first game...
VERY BIG SPOILERS HERE
... what with being the daughter of the doctor Joel stabs in the throat to save Ellie at the end of that story, thus dooming humanity in the process.
And that’s another thing I wanted to touch on. I remember so many friends and critics feeling let down that at the end of the first game you’re given zero choice but to stab the Doctor to save Ellie from a procedure that will save humanity but kill her in the process. I replayed the first game immediately prior to this, and... like the first time, that moment didn’t bother me as it did so many others. And I think it’s because I never felt Joel was the hero; he was just the protagonist. I kinda felt like them forcing you to do the unthinkable to end the first game was their way of telling players “you weren’t supposed to be rooting for this guy, you know that, right?” It was his Walter-White-telling-Skyler-that-he-did-it-for-himself moment. We want to always think we’re playing the good guy, but sometimes we don’t see the forest for the trees. For all the faults of the first game (which I do like), that never struck me as one of them.
Anyhoo...
Abby. AKA the actual sympathetic protagonist in this game, despite being the individual responsible for caving in Joel’s head with a five iron. Abby is a force, and while the game already feels too long by the time you get to her half of it, hers is the more interesting journey. Ellie’s is very much revisiting ground set by the first game (and the terrific Left Behind DLC); Abby’s half of the story—covering the same events from a different POV—shows that there’s a great deal more going on in America’s post-pandemic rebuilding than simply zombies/clickers/infected vs. humans. And while I do have some story issues, I’ll give them this credit for sure: they managed to take someone you despise at first and, by the end, manage to show how they are actually the far better person, all the while Ellie is becoming as deeply fucked-up and cruel as Joel. She has her reasons, but so does Abby, and Abby knows and sees her line in the sand far clearer than Ellie.
That’s not to say that Ellie’s journey is bad, but it’s certainly thinner, more “revenge good, me want.” There are brilliant moments throughout—like when Jesse shows up and you have your first chase sequence—but also you are, as Ellie, responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed in the game. Or any game. Like torturing Nora for information and seeing it from her POV. Like slitting Mel’s throat as they reveal her pregnancy. It’s... a rough trip, and she definitely loses herself and everyone and everything she cares about in the process.
Conversely Abby finds herself again. After tying things off with Joel and what’s left of Joel’s skull, she loses her lust for abject violence and befriends two castoffs from a religious sect her friends in the Western Liberation Front are warring with. Ellie’s journey is a descent, while Abby’s is an ascent (sometimes very literally—this game is the first to ever twig my fear of heights). She grows, learns how to open up and sacrifice, and is able to find some measure of hope again. I was actually disappointed when the game switched over to Abby, but by the end of her section I was even more bothered to have to revisit my time with Ellie, who I’d grown quite a distaste for.
To the swapping back and forth, I want to give ND further props for echoing one of my favourite moments in all of gaming: the point in "Legacy of Kain: Defiance" where the two protagonists you’ve been playing as in alternating chapters meet up to finally have it out in a cathedral, forcing you to play and reckon with both sides of this conflict. TLoU2 does this by slowly, deliberately building the tension in Ellie’s story only to cut it off right at the primary point of conflict, then forcing you to get to that same conflict from the other perspective, and to basically have to battle your shadow self—though which is more evil or deserving of suffering is, by the end, entirely up to you.
They almost undo all this good with the very last sequence, by forcing you to engage in a fight you truly do not wish to have. I’ll admit that had they not pulled back at the last moment, with Ellie trying to drown Abby after freeing her and Lev from a zombie apocalypse form of crucifixion, I would’ve declared this game a storytelling failure. It’s only at the very end that Ellie pulls back from total vengeance and allows for the slightest bit of growth, but it’s enough. The war ends, and she is done, having lost everything in the process—including herself. Again, for better and worse, ND held their last card until the very end. It’s not enough to make up for some of the storytelling shortcomings—make no mistake, this is a one-dimensional narrative with a lot left unexplored in terms of world and the future of it, if any—but it does cement this as one of the stronger video game character explorations ever done.
But that exploration comes with the biggest of caveats: this game is brutal, unforgiving, and at times repugnant in what experiences it thrusts upon you. It’s a game of at times unimaginable violence—much of it racially coded in ways it really feels like the developers are either unaware of or don’t care to analyze. But it’s also got some of the most breathtakingly tender and beautiful moments I’ve encountered in a game. The zebra. The seal. Moments between Ellie and Dina, or Abby and Lev. Joel on the porch with Ellie in the final flashback. Ellie singing “Take On Me” to Dina in the music shop.
But also Nora, a young Black woman, intentionally infected by Ellie and then beaten to death for information. Yara, a young Asian woman who has her arm shattered by a hammer from a religious zealot who wishes to condemn her trans brother to death, and who later loses that arm—and is killed the next day. Jesse, a young Asian man shot through the face. Manny, a young Latinx man shot in the face. Isaac, the head of the WLF and a Black Man, being shown as wanting to kill a child right before being gunned down. A majority of the Seraphites being Black men and women. One of the only WLF soldiers with an individual presence being a young Asian woman who Ellie stabs to death. All of this building off of all the voiced/named Black characters who died while the white protagonists lived in the first game and its DLC: Riley, Marlene, Sam, Henry... I mentioned this earlier this week on FB, but being BIPOC in a ND game is a death sentence. Now you could argue that pretty much everyone dies in this game—and almost everyone does—but no matter what the optics are bad when all your protagonists are white people viciously maiming and murdering BIPOC. In terms of non-white side characters, Dina and Lev are the only two survivors across 2.5 games. Yeah, ND is better about giving queer and otherwise marginalized people a presence in their games, but that feels undone when their presence is to be cannon fodder, their deaths the emotional push the white people need in order to go on. It’s rough no matter how you cut it. Would it be such a shitty pill to swallow if the industry as a whole were better about representation? Or if Ellie or Abby had not been white? Possibly, but there’s really no way of knowing. And I’m not sure it would be comfortable no matter how you sliced it in a game series so deeply nihilistic and, well, gross. Expertly made, but gross.
And it is expertly made. This is the best game ND has made in terms of visuals, score (Christ, the tension in the low heartbeat-like bass notes when being hunted), stealth mechanics, moving around, etc. Hell, it's one of the most visually impressive games ever, regardless of studio. Hand-to-hand combat is still several levels of ass, but at this point that's to be expected—it’s not something they’ve ever excelled in as a studio.
Expertly made, captivating in a page-turner sort of way, but also... I hope to hell they are done with this world and never return to it. This story is over. I likely would come back we’re they to make a third—though at times I thought “absolutely not, no fucking way would I subject myself to this oppressively bleak world again—but I really don’t want to. I want them to know when to walk away. The first game is a call, this is the answer. Be done and step back, please.
This is, truly, a game of such incredible contrast. It’s stunning to look at and listen to. Its set pieces and chase sequences are amazing (taking off on a horse at night while riding through a burning village in the midst of a full-scale assault is something I won’t forget anytime soon), and its dialogue writing and character work and acting are, sincerely, the best I’ve seen from this industry, and not by a little bit—we’re talking leaps and bounds here. And its emotional beats are largely earned. Also, the rat king encounter in the hospital parking garage is up there with revisiting the Ishimura in "Dead Space 2" as one of the most terrifying “I know this thing is out there but when will it strike” moments I’ve experienced in a horror game (and make no mistake: while the first TLoU was an adventure game, this is narrative survival horror). But it’s also a game where women, children, and people of colour suffer unimaginable pain and torment. Where violence is rendered with such care and attention to detail that at times your stomach turns.
It’s something I’m glad to have experienced if only to know what it is, but I don’t think I ever want to touch it again—and I certainly could not and would not blanketly recommend it to just anyone. It’s the first game I’ve played that’s just -begging- for a content warning, or a paragraph’s worth of them.
Is it the best game ever? The [insert great film or book here] of video games? No. Not for me. YMMV, but I need someone—anyone—to truly feel for on some level. There are people in this game who achieve some modicum of redemption, but only Lev and Dina—both side characters—are people you can actually put your heart into on some level without feeling like you’ve been infected by malice. While Ellie and Abby are interesting and at times compelling, by the end I am left never wanting to see or hear from them again. I’m not happy the journey is over, but I am relieved, like I’ve just escaped something threatening to my mental health.
And I’m sure that’s all in step with what ND wanted to do. And I commend them for having a vision and seeing it through (though not for their widely reported issues of a toxic and crunch-focused workplace culture). But it’s not a world I want to linger in or experience any more than is necessary. Especially when currently involved in a pandemic and seeing, unlike this world, people actually coming together and not aggressively turning on one another. Granted the context is different, as is the timeline, but the point remains: we are better than they imagine us to be. This game series is titled "The Last of Us" but what it really wants to show us is the very worst of us, and we are decidedly not that.
