TLOU2 Review Thread

[stroopwafel]

I don't wanna go back to harping on Abby's appearance.

But I'm fucking gonna.

This here is a video of the Worlds STRONGEST Woman, and Abby is easily as big if not bigger than her.
A woman who has trained her whole life to be strong as fuck, with the benefits of excessive nutrition, training, and still does not have a body like Abby.

Seeing this basically to me, confirms Abby was originally designed to be trans, it's the only possible reason why she's build like a man. Hell even professional female power lifters and the world's strongest, still retain female features like breasts, hips, butt, none of these things Abby has.

Which leads me to question, if you take away her being trans, why not change her character model too? Surely it couldn't be that hard to edit the model, considering they do it for flashbacks and the prison scene at the end. Hell Abby looks much more like a top female athlete when starving from a pole at the end of the game than her just normal deal.

It honestly has made me realize how much a character's appearance effects my immersion with a game. Like Zarya from Overwatch being a ripped badass doesn't bother me because it makes sense in my mind due to the nature of the character. Lara Croft is a character I love (except in the third game) because her struggles fit her appearance.

I'm beginging to realize why Microtransactions are so successful. Appearances fucking matter. I never cared that much until I'm forced to deal with a character who is so out of place that it becomes bothering.

In the artbook Abby's initial designs were actually much more, ehm..feminine. I think they chose the buff/'masculine' design more for story reasons. She becomes muscular as a reaction to some traumatic incident which is not uncommon as some kind of compensatory mechanism to cope. Many people change their appearance when they feel they have lost control. It's also communicated through gameplay the way she fights to survive. But I think ultimately it serves to contrast the way she looks during the finale of the game just to see the toll of her decisions reflected in the design. It simply would not have such an impact if she wasn't a pile of muscles beforehand. From the first time we meet Abby to the last time I don't think there would be this sheer sense of desperation if it wasn't also reflected in the character model. They really showed that trajectory of just utter vulnerability at the end. It's like literally the layers were peeled off of both characters and it really worked for me.

 

[Kwak]

God damn you Skillup

But... if satire means the OPPOSITE, does this mean he thinks Maneater is a shit game?

 

[Sneed's SeednFeed]

I don't wanna go back to harping on Abby's appearance.

But I'm fucking gonna.

This here is a video of the Worlds STRONGEST Woman, and Abby is easily as big if not bigger than her.
A woman who has trained her whole life to be strong as fuck, with the benefits of excessive nutrition, training, and still does not have a body like Abby.

Seeing this basically to me, confirms Abby was originally designed to be trans, it's the only possible reason why she's build like a man. Hell even professional female power lifters and the world's strongest, still retain female features like breasts, hips, butt, none of these things Abby has.

Y'all are getting bent out of shape because she has biceps and deltoids lmao. Abby literally just looks like someone who has worked as a builder or as a farmer for an extended period of time, and important thing to note is that anytime anyone's gonna mention female powerlifters, bodybuilders, weightlfters, etc, that these women also do exercises that target leg muscles which can accentuate hip shape, but that this varies with independent morphology for which men and women have significant overlap even if they don't lift. If you just do manual labour, it's gonna be all upper body, especially if you have an average, boxy body like most women in the world (and Abby).

And even then, your cherry pick is irrelevant. It's not uncommon for professional weightlifters to accentuate their femininity since I know from personal correspondence that both male and female lifters are very insecure about their appearance.

Compare what you posted, with the physiologies in motion presented in this video for example:

Hell, even with Sukanya here:

Suddenly the standard deviation is far wider than the one video with Eddie Hall, doesn't it?

 

[Bartholen]

Finished it this week, started playing again 2 days later.

I have to say this is probably the most suicidally ambitious, insanely, delusionally risky game I've ever seen. As much as I wanted to tout that the people pissed off about it were just anti-SJW neckbeards who wouldn't recognize nuanced storytelling if it smacked them with a golf club, I can't say I don't see their points of view. The enjoyment you get from the game hinges entirely, and I have to stress completely and entirely on one incredibly risky narrative conceit, and if that doesn't work for you, the whole game falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane. And I'm saying this as someone for whom it worked! By the end I was fully on board with Abby, and had come to see Ellie as little more than a blood-crazed detestable psycho. As it seemed to be wrapping up I was ready to declare it a masterpiece.

And then the ending happened. Or rather, the endings happened, because this fucking thing ends like 17 times.

This is the first time I've ever decided to settle on a headcanon for an ending. Usually I'm all about respecting the creator's vision and blah blah blah, but here I think it's screamingly obvious that the game would have been vastly improved by cutting out the final Santa Barbara segment with Ellie. At that point we've had the climax of the story, seen both sides, thoroughly explored the very simple themes of the game, and had epilogues for both the main characters. It's over, we've seen it! But no, fucking no, we drag this incessant misery out for another 2 goddamn torturous hours fighting bullshit enemies we have no connection to, to achieve precisely dick-all. My heart bleeds for those poor programmers and designers who had to hammer out all these environments and character designs for a section you could cut out wholesale and lose nothing. It's even more of a shame because the change of environment is very refreshing from dreary, rainy Seattle, and zombie stories in sunny settings tend to be pretty rare. I wasn't even in disagreement with how the story ended, I just loathed how it had to keep dragging its characters, and by proxy us, through the muck to hamfistedly hammer home the message we'd already gotten tired of 6 hours ago.

As such, my personal headcanon ending is thus: When Abby and Lev are ambushed at Santa Barbara, it's not the dipshits led by Guy Fieri, but rather Ellie and Tommy having put out a false lead to draw them out. Then something happens, maybe Ellie and Abby have a final punchup and Ellie comes to the same conclusion as in the final ending. Tommy puts out Lev's eye or something so we can still hammer home the "eye for an eye and so on" message. Abby and Lev leave for the Fireflies, Ellie is still left traumatized, but at least neither the characters nor the player are forced to sit through another 2 hours of misery. In the end it's left ambiguous if Lev and Abby ever find peace with the Fireflies, and whether Ellie can ever get over her trauma. 20 minutes tops, and we're done. The final Santa Barbara segment is just a nightmare/revenge fantasy Ellie keeps having at night, where she can neither get her revenge, nor live with the thought of actually being able to get it.

I'm not usually one to infer things about an artist from their work, but if I was a teacher and one of my students handed this to me as a creative writing assignment, I'd have to wonder if they were okay. For some reason Neil Druckmann seems to be absolutely enthralled with inflicting the maximum amount of misery, pain, trauma and horror on every character, including the players themselves. I started thinking about comparisons to the first game, and came to the conclusion that were Sam and Henry's death scene from the first game portrayed in part 2, they would have fully shown Henry's brains splattering on the wall, and focused on Joel and Ellie wailing over their dead bodies for like 2 minutes instead of the cut to black that made the deaths in the first game so effective.

The focus on all things miserable goes so far beyond extreme it just becomes repellant and repugnant. Did we really need to have Ellie get stabbed by a tree branch when she was hanging from the trap in Santa Barbara? What did that achieve? And fuck me, I really didn't want to imagine what was being done to Abby for literally months before Ellie showed up. For all his progressive tendencies, Druckmann really dove into some really revolting, ugly shit there. Do the math: The Reavers (or whoever they were) call Abby "quite a catch". We see that people will rather kill themselves than go back to their imprisonment. People are being kept in cages, with those trying to escape being left to die of starvation and exposure. Abby has tried to escape. I don't really need to tell you what the obvious implication is here, do I?

See how I've not mentioned the gameplay, design, graphics, or really anything beyond the ending at all? That's how much depends on the game's story working for the player. You can't really even try to enjoy it in a vacuum out of context, because every element in even the moment to moment gameplay is designed to disturb and discomfort the player: dogs whimper, every enemy is named, Ellie looks like a fucking sicko in stealth kills and so on. The Abby half of the game is so goddamn fucking padded out it just turned into white noise for most of it. Despite there being excellent encounters and setpieces (the descent down the ruined hotel comes to mind), they're mostly just about getting from point A to point B in the story. Granted, in the first game that was also true, but there we were also discovering different facets of the world and meeting different characters like Bill. Here we're already familiar with the world, so there's not much narrative the game can offer there. I did get quite a kick out of the wargamer's apartment easter egg though: I play DnD and Warhammer as well so it was really funny to me They even made many unique assets for that single apartment alone.

Final grade: 7/10.
Pros:
+ the sheer amount of effort and detail on display in everything
+ voice acting
+ the graphics, my fucking god!
+ gameplay is really refined and satisfying
Cons:
- the story simply collapses under its own ambition, and isn't as clever or deep as it thinks it is
- the game hinges so much on the story that if the story doesn't work for you, the entire game won't
- absurdly padded and drawn out, 5-7 hours could have been easily cut
- the wallowing in misery and suffering without much to balance it out.

 

[BrawlMan]

Cons:
- the story simply collapses under its own ambition, and isn't as clever or deep as it thinks it is
- the game hinges so much on the story that if the story doesn't work for you, the entire game won't
- absurdly padded and drawn out, 5-7 hours could have been easily cut
- the wallowing in misery and suffering without much to balance it out.

To me, these cons alone don't make a 7/10 for. At best it would be a 6/10 or 5/10 at worst. Which is an equivalent of a deep sale or high rental. I do highly respect you for your honesty.

The more I look at this, the more I see that I have already played better. The Evil Within 2 does all things better than LofUs II other than stealth. But that is not saying much as I've already played better than stealth games or stealth elements.

Evil Within 2 does better

• In story characters, themes, and grey areas. Like actual grey areas with people who work within Mobius.
• At balancing the seriousness, goofiness, and levity that feels honest. The game knows how to make fun of itself despite being a horror game.
• Creatures and monster design that actually make more sense compared to the mushroom zombies. This one is more of a personal thing, so I won't go in to details.
• Semi-open world with options. Compared to the Part II, it's narrow corridor disguised as semi-open. Evil Within 2 has linear moments, and walking sections too, but the latter is far rarer compared to Part II. Also, you get actual story, lore, and reward with items for completing actual side objectives or exploring the off beaten path.

 

[Bartholen]

To me, these cons alone don't make a 7/10 for. At best it would be a 6/10 or 5/10 at worst. Which is an equivalent of a deep sale or high rental. I do highly respect you for your honesty.

That's because like I said, the narrative conceit did work for me. If it didn't, I'd have been hesitant to give it anything more than a 5/10. But because the game has everything hinge on the story with such a risky structure, I see it as ill-judged and therefore a flaw. If we were juding by ambition alone, this game's a 13/10, but the execution is seriously flawed.

 

[BrawlMan]

That's because like I said, the narrative conceit did work for me. If it didn't, I'd have been hesitant to give it anything more than a 5/10. But because the game has everything hinge on the story with such a risky structure, I see it as ill-judged and therefore a flaw. If we were juding by ambition alone, this game's a 13/10, but the execution is seriously flawed.

that's the thing, what worked for you is not working for a lot of people right now. It is even worse with a Japanese, and they love the first last of us game. I know someone mentioned in on the form earlier, and I was shocked that happened. They love the new God of War more than this game.

I know the game is still making sales, but I'm worried about the long-term after effects. global corporate circle jerking, anti-sjw fans, most of the game critics care more about tearing at each other's throats than having fun orplaying the actual game. All of this and most of these people will learn nothing from it. Only for the dumb process to start all over again.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Y'all are getting bent out of shape because she has biceps and deltoids lmao. Abby literally just looks like someone who has worked as a builder or as a farmer for an extended period of time, and important thing to note is that anytime anyone's gonna mention female powerlifters, bodybuilders, weightlfters, etc, that these women also do exercises that target leg muscles which can accentuate hip shape, but that this varies with independent morphology for which men and women have significant overlap even if they don't lift. If you just do manual labour, it's gonna be all upper body, especially if you have an average, boxy body like most women in the world (and Abby).

And even then, your cherry pick is irrelevant. It's not uncommon for professional weightlifters to accentuate their femininity since I know from personal correspondence that both male and female lifters are very insecure about their appearance.

Compare what you posted, with the physiologies in motion presented in this video for example:

Hell, even with Sukanya here:

Suddenly the standard deviation is far wider than the one video with Eddie Hall, doesn't it?

Tri’s too for sure...I think she’s been mostly doing a ton of benching and dips. There is that huge gym and a buffet line you’re introduced to early in her portion, so she had the means.

She seemed on the thicker side even before all hell broke loose though -

Skip to 2:20 for her younger model and 5:00 for the present one. It depends on the angle, but she’s just plain thick; not string bean like Ellie or biggest natty ever -


The other thing is not knowing completely what Naughty Dog’s guidelines were when creating this character model. They probably accentuated her build to make a statement vs going for pure realism or practicality.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Finished it this week, started playing again 2 days later.

I have to say this is probably the most suicidally ambitious, insanely, delusionally risky game I've ever seen. As much as I wanted to tout that the people pissed off about it were just anti-SJW neckbeards who wouldn't recognize nuanced storytelling if it smacked them with a golf club, I can't say I don't see their points of view. The enjoyment you get from the game hinges entirely, and I have to stress completely and entirely on one incredibly risky narrative conceit, and if that doesn't work for you, the whole game falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane. And I'm saying this as someone for whom it worked! By the end I was fully on board with Abby, and had come to see Ellie as little more than a blood-crazed detestable psycho. As it seemed to be wrapping up I was ready to declare it a masterpiece.

And then the ending happened. Or rather, the endings happened, because this fucking thing ends like 17 times.

This is the first time I've ever decided to settle on a headcanon for an ending. Usually I'm all about respecting the creator's vision and blah blah blah, but here I think it's screamingly obvious that the game would have been vastly improved by cutting out the final Santa Barbara segment with Ellie. At that point we've had the climax of the story, seen both sides, thoroughly explored the very simple themes of the game, and had epilogues for both the main characters. It's over, we've seen it! But no, fucking no, we drag this incessant misery out for another 2 goddamn torturous hours fighting bullshit enemies we have no connection to, to achieve precisely dick-all. My heart bleeds for those poor programmers and designers who had to hammer out all these environments and character designs for a section you could cut out wholesale and lose nothing. It's even more of a shame because the change of environment is very refreshing from dreary, rainy Seattle, and zombie stories in sunny settings tend to be pretty rare. I wasn't even in disagreement with how the story ended, I just loathed how it had to keep dragging its characters, and by proxy us, through the muck to hamfistedly hammer home the message we'd already gotten tired of 6 hours ago.

As such, my personal headcanon ending is thus: When Abby and Lev are ambushed at Santa Barbara, it's not the dipshits led by Guy Fieri, but rather Ellie and Tommy having put out a false lead to draw them out. Then something happens, maybe Ellie and Abby have a final punchup and Ellie comes to the same conclusion as in the final ending. Tommy puts out Lev's eye or something so we can still hammer home the "eye for an eye and so on" message. Abby and Lev leave for the Fireflies, Ellie is still left traumatized, but at least neither the characters nor the player are forced to sit through another 2 hours of misery. In the end it's left ambiguous if Lev and Abby ever find peace with the Fireflies, and whether Ellie can ever get over her trauma. 20 minutes tops, and we're done. The final Santa Barbara segment is just a nightmare/revenge fantasy Ellie keeps having at night, where she can neither get her revenge, nor live with the thought of actually being able to get it.

I'm not usually one to infer things about an artist from their work, but if I was a teacher and one of my students handed this to me as a creative writing assignment, I'd have to wonder if they were okay. For some reason Neil Druckmann seems to be absolutely enthralled with inflicting the maximum amount of misery, pain, trauma and horror on every character, including the players themselves. I started thinking about comparisons to the first game, and came to the conclusion that were Sam and Henry's death scene from the first game portrayed in part 2, they would have fully shown Henry's brains splattering on the wall, and focused on Joel and Ellie wailing over their dead bodies for like 2 minutes instead of the cut to black that made the deaths in the first game so effective.

The focus on all things miserable goes so far beyond extreme it just becomes repellant and repugnant. Did we really need to have Ellie get stabbed by a tree branch when she was hanging from the trap in Santa Barbara? What did that achieve? And fuck me, I really didn't want to imagine what was being done to Abby for literally months before Ellie showed up. For all his progressive tendencies, Druckmann really dove into some really revolting, ugly shit there. Do the math: The Reavers (or whoever they were) call Abby "quite a catch". We see that people will rather kill themselves than go back to their imprisonment. People are being kept in cages, with those trying to escape being left to die of starvation and exposure. Abby has tried to escape. I don't really need to tell you what the obvious implication is here, do I?

See how I've not mentioned the gameplay, design, graphics, or really anything beyond the ending at all? That's how much depends on the game's story working for the player. You can't really even try to enjoy it in a vacuum out of context, because every element in even the moment to moment gameplay is designed to disturb and discomfort the player: dogs whimper, every enemy is named, Ellie looks like a fucking sicko in stealth kills and so on. The Abby half of the game is so goddamn fucking padded out it just turned into white noise for most of it. Despite there being excellent encounters and setpieces (the descent down the ruined hotel comes to mind), they're mostly just about getting from point A to point B in the story. Granted, in the first game that was also true, but there we were also discovering different facets of the world and meeting different characters like Bill. Here we're already familiar with the world, so there's not much narrative the game can offer there. I did get quite a kick out of the wargamer's apartment easter egg though: I play DnD and Warhammer as well so it was really funny to me They even made many unique assets for that single apartment alone.

Final grade: 7/10.
Pros:
+ the sheer amount of effort and detail on display in everything
+ voice acting
+ the graphics, my fucking god!
+ gameplay is really refined and satisfying
Cons:
- the story simply collapses under its own ambition, and isn't as clever or deep as it thinks it is
- the game hinges so much on the story that if the story doesn't work for you, the entire game won't
- absurdly padded and drawn out, 5-7 hours could have been easily cut
- the wallowing in misery and suffering without much to balance it out.

The game is too self-serious. It could've had the same amount of suffering and agony, but a little bit of self deprication would've done wonders to not make it feel so exhausting. You look at something like Silent Hill 2 and you have people who are suicidal trying to figure themselves out in a hell town. Yet the tone - while oppressive, creepy, and even depressive - never becomes overbearing. In TLoU2 the tone is overbearing almost from the get-go. Everyone seems miserable and tired even before they become miserable and tired.

The biggest problems beyond that are that Ellie feels written out of character and Abby just isn't very interesting or entertaining (neither is Ellie). There is a silver lining to the ending for me though, in that it kinda feels like Ellie has achieved a level of independence she never really had before. She's now completely alone, but also free to be her own person, not tied down by Joel, Dina, Tommy, or her place in Jackson. I'd be interested in experiencing this new lone Ellie in a sequel.. if Neil Druckmann decides to grow up a little and not act like such an angsty teen.

 

[Bartholen]

I'd be interested in experiencing this new lone Ellie in a sequel.. if Neil Druckmann decides to grow up a little and not act like such an angsty teen.

It'd be funny if the third game was a full on open world, and Ellie decided to use her immunity for the good of others by clearing spore infestations before they fully bloom, like a post-apocalyptic chimney sweep. The hat and the exaggerated "'Ullo guvnah" accent included.

Fuck it, since I already made a headcanon ending, I'm going full on fanfiction here:

Spoiler: My wholesome fanfic ending

Right after Abby disappears into the fog on the boat, she instantly turns back and comes to Ellie.
Abby: Hey man, I'm really sorry about biting off your fingers, but you were trying to kill me.
Ellie: You know what, I've kind of had my fill of this shit. It's heavy and not really fun, ya know?
Abby: Bro, that sucks. You know what is fun though? Dungeons and Dragons. I heard the Fireflies have this really great campaign going and are looking for new players.
Ellie: Really? I always wanted to try that out.
Abby: Hop on dude! Let's put this shit behind us.
*boat drives away. A montage of Abby and Ellie getting to the Fireflies and spending months bonding, healing and having fun together playing DnD follows. Ellie is shown to send a letter to Dina that she won't be home for a while, but everything's alright. At the end of the montage Ellie receives a letter*
Letter: Hey Ellie, hope you're doing well. It turned out that the farmhouse had a pretty bad mold problem, so JJ and I are moving back to Jackson to try to find new digs. I didn't know what you wanted to take with so I left all your stuff in your room. I suggest you get there soon before squatters or infected take it over. Love you! Dina.
Ellie: Oh man, I totally forgot about that. Sorry Abby, I really gotta go.
Abby: Really? Bummer dude, we're just about to fight Vecna.
Ellie: Hey I know. I left instructions for the DM on how to play my character.
Abby: Well, ya gotta do whatcha gotta do. You're gonna come back, right? I'm already making a sheet for my new character in the next campaign.
Ellie: Hey bro, what if I moved here with Dina and JJ? It's way warmer here than in Jackson.
Abby: Sounds awesome dude! I'll get your boat ready.
*cue the final section of the game with Ellie on the farm, but this time we see her internal monologue. She enters her room, with Joel's guitar there. She starts playing*
Ellie (internally): Aw, crap! I forgot that this was here. And playing with two fewer fingers ain't really easy. Well, I can still learn. I just need to pop back to Jackson to pick up some bigger saddlebags, I don't want my last memento of Joel to break.
*cue the final shot with the guitar leaning against the windowsill while Ellie is walking away from the farm in the background*
Ellie (internally): Gotta get the saddlebags... and some more stuff... there was so much more than I remembered. After that, set sail with Dina and JJ. I can't wait to get to the next campaign. I've thought about playing a barbarian, actually.

And yes, they both speak like 20-something 90s surfer bros

 

[Casual Shinji]

And yes, they both speak like 20-something 90s surfer bros

It's funny you mention that, because I remember thinking during my first playthrough how humor and experessions would've (should've) changed 25 years after the collapse of society. The people in TLoU obviously speak like people from our cultural zeitgeist, but it makes no real sense that they do.

 

[blackdiamond]

Finished it this week, started playing again 2 days later.

I have to say this is probably the most suicidally ambitious, insanely, delusionally risky game I've ever seen. As much as I wanted to tout that the people pissed off about it were just anti-SJW neckbeards who wouldn't recognize nuanced storytelling if it smacked them with a golf club, I can't say I don't see their points of view. The enjoyment you get from the game hinges entirely, and I have to stress completely and entirely on one incredibly risky narrative conceit, and if that doesn't work for you, the whole game falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane. And I'm saying this as someone for whom it worked! By the end I was fully on board with Abby, and had come to see Ellie as little more than a blood-crazed detestable psycho. As it seemed to be wrapping up I was ready to declare it a masterpiece.

And then the ending happened. Or rather, the endings happened, because this fucking thing ends like 17 times.

This is the first time I've ever decided to settle on a headcanon for an ending. Usually I'm all about respecting the creator's vision and blah blah blah, but here I think it's screamingly obvious that the game would have been vastly improved by cutting out the final Santa Barbara segment with Ellie. At that point we've had the climax of the story, seen both sides, thoroughly explored the very simple themes of the game, and had epilogues for both the main characters. It's over, we've seen it! But no, fucking no, we drag this incessant misery out for another 2 goddamn torturous hours fighting bullshit enemies we have no connection to, to achieve precisely dick-all. My heart bleeds for those poor programmers and designers who had to hammer out all these environments and character designs for a section you could cut out wholesale and lose nothing. It's even more of a shame because the change of environment is very refreshing from dreary, rainy Seattle, and zombie stories in sunny settings tend to be pretty rare. I wasn't even in disagreement with how the story ended, I just loathed how it had to keep dragging its characters, and by proxy us, through the muck to hamfistedly hammer home the message we'd already gotten tired of 6 hours ago.

As such, my personal headcanon ending is thus: When Abby and Lev are ambushed at Santa Barbara, it's not the dipshits led by Guy Fieri, but rather Ellie and Tommy having put out a false lead to draw them out. Then something happens, maybe Ellie and Abby have a final punchup and Ellie comes to the same conclusion as in the final ending. Tommy puts out Lev's eye or something so we can still hammer home the "eye for an eye and so on" message. Abby and Lev leave for the Fireflies, Ellie is still left traumatized, but at least neither the characters nor the player are forced to sit through another 2 hours of misery. In the end it's left ambiguous if Lev and Abby ever find peace with the Fireflies, and whether Ellie can ever get over her trauma. 20 minutes tops, and we're done. The final Santa Barbara segment is just a nightmare/revenge fantasy Ellie keeps having at night, where she can neither get her revenge, nor live with the thought of actually being able to get it.

I'm not usually one to infer things about an artist from their work, but if I was a teacher and one of my students handed this to me as a creative writing assignment, I'd have to wonder if they were okay. For some reason Neil Druckmann seems to be absolutely enthralled with inflicting the maximum amount of misery, pain, trauma and horror on every character, including the players themselves. I started thinking about comparisons to the first game, and came to the conclusion that were Sam and Henry's death scene from the first game portrayed in part 2, they would have fully shown Henry's brains splattering on the wall, and focused on Joel and Ellie wailing over their dead bodies for like 2 minutes instead of the cut to black that made the deaths in the first game so effective.

The focus on all things miserable goes so far beyond extreme it just becomes repellant and repugnant. Did we really need to have Ellie get stabbed by a tree branch when she was hanging from the trap in Santa Barbara? What did that achieve? And fuck me, I really didn't want to imagine what was being done to Abby for literally months before Ellie showed up. For all his progressive tendencies, Druckmann really dove into some really revolting, ugly shit there. Do the math: The Reavers (or whoever they were) call Abby "quite a catch". We see that people will rather kill themselves than go back to their imprisonment. People are being kept in cages, with those trying to escape being left to die of starvation and exposure. Abby has tried to escape. I don't really need to tell you what the obvious implication is here, do I?

See how I've not mentioned the gameplay, design, graphics, or really anything beyond the ending at all? That's how much depends on the game's story working for the player. You can't really even try to enjoy it in a vacuum out of context, because every element in even the moment to moment gameplay is designed to disturb and discomfort the player: dogs whimper, every enemy is named, Ellie looks like a fucking sicko in stealth kills and so on. The Abby half of the game is so goddamn fucking padded out it just turned into white noise for most of it. Despite there being excellent encounters and setpieces (the descent down the ruined hotel comes to mind), they're mostly just about getting from point A to point B in the story. Granted, in the first game that was also true, but there we were also discovering different facets of the world and meeting different characters like Bill. Here we're already familiar with the world, so there's not much narrative the game can offer there. I did get quite a kick out of the wargamer's apartment easter egg though: I play DnD and Warhammer as well so it was really funny to me They even made many unique assets for that single apartment alone.

Final grade: 7/10.
Pros:
+ the sheer amount of effort and detail on display in everything
+ voice acting
+ the graphics, my fucking god!
+ gameplay is really refined and satisfying
Cons:
- the story simply collapses under its own ambition, and isn't as clever or deep as it thinks it is
- the game hinges so much on the story that if the story doesn't work for you, the entire game won't
- absurdly padded and drawn out, 5-7 hours could have been easily cut
- the wallowing in misery and suffering without much to balance it out.

This is my headcannon for the ending:
To me God of War had a WAY worse ending, it was the biggest middle-finger to an audience i've ever seen(well since the LOST series finale anyways)- "Oh you want a satisfying boss fight and conclusion?" "HAHAHA fuck you!"

I for one never got tired of the message, I think those last few hours were very much necessary to have Ellie finally face her demons due to her severe PTSD, and I liked going up against the Rattlers as they were the most evil group in the game, and I liked the irony of how Abby would've been dead if Ellie hadn't set out after her.

 

[blackdiamond]

It'd be funny if the third game was a full on open world, and Ellie decided to use her immunity for the good of others by clearing spore infestations before they fully bloom, like a post-apocalyptic chimney sweep. The hat and the exaggerated "'Ullo guvnah" accent included.

Fuck it, since I already made a headcanon ending, I'm going full on fanfiction here:

Spoiler: My wholesome fanfic ending

Right after Abby disappears into the fog on the boat, she instantly turns back and comes to Ellie.
Abby: Hey man, I'm really sorry about biting off your fingers, but you were trying to kill me.
Ellie: You know what, I've kind of had my fill of this shit. It's heavy and not really fun, ya know?
Abby: Bro, that sucks. You know what is fun though? Dungeons and Dragons. I heard the Fireflies have this really great campaign going and are looking for new players.
Ellie: Really? I always wanted to try that out.
Abby: Hop on dude! Let's put this shit behind us.
*boat drives away. A montage of Abby and Ellie getting to the Fireflies and spending months bonding, healing and having fun together playing DnD follows. Ellie is shown to send a letter to Dina that she won't be home for a while, but everything's alright. At the end of the montage Ellie receives a letter*
Letter: Hey Ellie, hope you're doing well. It turned out that the farmhouse had a pretty bad mold problem, so JJ and I are moving back to Jackson to try to find new digs. I didn't know what you wanted to take with so I left all your stuff in your room. I suggest you get there soon before squatters or infected take it over. Love you! Dina.
Ellie: Oh man, I totally forgot about that. Sorry Abby, I really gotta go.
Abby: Really? Bummer dude, we're just about to fight Vecna.
Ellie: Hey I know. I left instructions for the DM on how to play my character.
Abby: Well, ya gotta do whatcha gotta do. You're gonna come back, right? I'm already making a sheet for my new character in the next campaign.
Ellie: Hey bro, what if I moved here with Dina and JJ? It's way warmer here than in Jackson.
Abby: Sounds awesome dude! I'll get your boat ready.
*cue the final section of the game with Ellie on the farm, but this time we see her internal monologue. She enters her room, with Joel's guitar there. She starts playing*
Ellie (internally): Aw, crap! I forgot that this was here. And playing with two fewer fingers ain't really easy. Well, I can still learn. I just need to pop back to Jackson to pick up some bigger saddlebags, I don't want my last memento of Joel to break.
*cue the final shot with the guitar leaning against the windowsill while Ellie is walking away from the farm in the background*
Ellie (internally): Gotta get the saddlebags... and some more stuff... there was so much more than I remembered. After that, set sail with Dina and JJ. I can't wait to get to the next campaign. I've thought about playing a barbarian, actually.

And yes, they both speak like 20-something 90s surfer bros

Also this:

 

[blackdiamond]

The game is too self-serious. It could've had the same amount of suffering and agony, but a little bit of self deprication would've done wonders to not make it feel so exhausting. You look at something like Silent Hill 2 and you have people who are suicidal trying to figure themselves out in a hell town. Yet the tone - while oppressive, creepy, and even depressive - never becomes overbearing. In TLoU2 the tone is overbearing almost from the get-go. Everyone seems miserable and tired even before they become miserable and tired.

The biggest problems beyond that are that Ellie feels written out of character and Abby just isn't very interesting or entertaining (neither is Ellie). There is a silver lining to the ending for me though, in that it kinda feels like Ellie has achieved a level of independence she never really had before. She's now completely alone, but also free to be her own person, not tied down by Joel, Dina, Tommy, or her place in Jackson. I'd be interested in experiencing this new lone Ellie in a sequel.. if Neil Druckmann decides to grow up a little and not act like such an angsty teen.

She didn't feel out of character to me at all and If or one found Abby very interesting, i'm glad the game took itself seriously, not EVERY single piece of media has to have constant wisecracking ala the MCU films, it would've sounded especially out of place in this setting, if I want a funny game set in a post-apocalypse, i'll play Sunset Overdrive or the Borderlands games. Let me have my serious game dammit. I didn't find it overbearing at all, I thought it had enough funny and cute moments to balance out the darkness. Ellie technically is a teen in this game so her character makes total sense, and of course she's pissed off, who wouldn't be?

Also I don't think she's totally alone:

 

[blackdiamond]

that's the thing, what worked for you is not working for a lot of people right now. It is even worse with a Japanese, and they love the first last of us game. I know someone mentioned in on the form earlier, and I was shocked that happened. They love the new God of War more than this game.

I know the game is still making sales, but I'm worried about the long-term after effects. global corporate circle jerking, anti-sjw fans, most of the game critics care more about tearing at each other's throats than having fun orplaying the actual game. All of this and most of these people will learn nothing from it. Only for the dumb process to start all over again.

Japan also likes a lot of REALLY creepy shit, so forgive me for not giving two shits what they think about this game.

 

[BrawlMan]

Japan also likes a lot of REALLY creepy shit, so forgive me for not giving two shits what they think about this game.

Not all people in Japan like creepy shit.

It does not invalidate their opinion just because of different interests. That's just flicking away criticism.

 

[blackdiamond]

Not all people in Japan like creepy shit.

It does not invalidate their opinion just because of different interests. That's just flicking away criticism.

Isn't that kind of what you're doing though? You're saying "oh Japan hated therefore their opinion on the game is the ONLY correct one!", which is utter nonsense. It hardly invalidates the people in other countries that did like it.

I'm kinda wondering if the reason Japan wasn't fond of it is because of the prominence of LGBTQ characters as they aren't exactly known for being enlightened in that regard, just look at the creepy bigoted shit in Persona 5 to see what I mean: https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/31/2...ts-changed-scene-ryuji-homophobia-controversy

 

[Houseman]

They probably accentuated her build to make a statement

What statement would that be, I wonder?

It seems like, in their quest to bash stereotypes, break the glass ceiling, and avoid unrealistic body standards for women, they ended up making a man named "Abby".

 

[Bartholen]

To me God of War had a WAY worse ending, it was the biggest middle-finger to an audience i've ever seen(well since the LOST series finale anyways)- "Oh you want a satisfying boss fight and conclusion?" "HAHAHA fuck you!"

This is why I hate the naming of running series repeating the same title, because I can't tell if you're talking about the first God of War game (probably not), the initial God of War trilogy (your description could fit God of War 3) or the latest entry in the series from 2018 (my most likely guess).

 

[blackdiamond]

What statement would that be, I wonder?

It seems like, in their quest to bash stereotypes, break the glass ceiling, and avoid unrealistic body standards for women, they ended up making a man named "Abby".

Spare me the transphobia.