Brings up good points especially about having the death play out last but Druckmann of course just couldn’t help himself and wanted dat shock value. I don’t understand the RTS “playing as the bad guy” comparison though, as I’ve never been emotionally moved or made empathetic towards anything involving ordering dozens/hundreds of pawns and equipment around a map. It sounds like the dude just personally being a fan of them.
I think you can introduce characters knowing that they're going to die and still make them engaging, I mean, just look at
Berserk's Golden Age arc (also a story that's very grimdark but handles it fucking leaps and bounds better).
TLoU2 however isn't very good at making us care about the characters in general, since almost all of them are kinda petty assholes who are hellbent on making life worse for other assholes. Knowing then that two of these assholes die and how and when, it's really too much to ask for the audience to give a shit about them during a flashback.
The first
TLoU had an issue by having certain characters be introduced with a giant sign that said 'this person will die in the foreseeable future', but at least these characters weren't really, really shitty people. I mean, Tess was kind of an asshole, but she quickly regains a lot of humanity once she understands what's at stake.
Back to the video, don't know how I feel about narrative choice being in this game - kinda find that whole concept in games highly overrated - but the fact that this video managed to somewhat sell me on
TLoU2's story if it had these tweaks is worthy of some respect.
www.gamespot.com
