TLOU2 Review Thread
- Thread starter Phoenixmgs
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At least you can still get the same laugh reaction through the emoticons button, but I wanted the self satisfaction of typing the "HA!"myself. You still have a major point.
You kidding me? Pound for pound Druckmann has made something bleak yet relatable in a month where opression is happening across the world and all good thing seem to have vanished from the world. Leaving only a rotten veneer beneathThis is just sad-
Last of Us 2 voice actor Laura Bailey shares death threats on Twitter
The voice of Abby from The Last of Us Part 2 is the target of online harassment. She took to Twitter in an attempt to stop this madness.www.shacknews.com
Regardless of what people think of the game, it’s pretty ironic that its themes aren’t very far removed from how some of these fanatics act like IRL. The scary part is a lot of them will breed at some point, and pass that repugnance on to their offspring.
I've pretty much decided I'm good with the first one and decided to go ahead and just watch/read all the spoiler stuff.
And I feel justified in my feeling of not really caring to play through this one. Abby is a sociopath, Ellie becomes a sociopath, a lot of the people you meet either sociopaths or fucking assholes and....I guess I don't really care anymore. There's only so much of the grimdark Everyone is a fucking sociopath, asshole and maybe 5 good people in the world before I decide I don't care to spend 20 hours exploring this world when I have plenty of other things I can do with my time.
Not to mention "The world is fucked" thing due to pandemic and selfish assholes hits a bit close to home right now.
A second playthrough certainly isn't improving this game. Once you skip most extra-lengthy cutscenes and rush through the flashback segments, the game is actually a lot shorter. Which straight up just pisses me off. I'd like to see someone go through this game with a timer and see how much game there actually is in this game.
- Starting from Seattle day 1, because everything up to that point is essentially a long tutorial.
- Not counting the flashbacks, because even their gameplay sections are essentially just being forced to play as a more limited version of Ellie
- Not counting the linear forced walking segments
- Not counting any cutscenes
- Because the zones are much larger and sprawling, this means the amount of scrounging every goddamn corner of the map has increased massively.
- The stealth is much more frustrating for the same reason: at the same time the distances between enemies have been extended, and the range of listen mode has been limited. Because enemies can spot you from a very long distance, and will react to seeing a friendly get shot from an equal distance, it's way harder to execute "perfect" stealth. The amount of silent stealth options is also vastly reduced because you can only carry 6 arrows at a time. But trying to pick off the enemies with melee kills is also ill-advised because enemies rarely patrol alone, dogs can sniff you before they see you, and while locked into the kill animation you can be easily spotted. Enemies are also much more often in multiple directions, including vertically, so constantly scanning the environment is a must for successful stealth. As such, the dynamic changes from kill enemy with stealth kill -> look for next target without being spotted to kill enemy with stealth kill-> get spotted -> short firefight to pick off a couple of enemies -> lose the pursuers -> repeat. Chokepoints where a large group of enemies are gathered around the only exit are also far more common, and even if you get to those exits they often force you to expose yourself to the enemy (looking at you, red door in Hillside and the jumping point in the parking garage encounter).
- Due to the much harder stealth, scrounging for resources is actually a lot less valuable than it seems, because whatever resources you gain from it, you'll have used around 60-80% of that amount trying to get to those supplies. Especially due to the massive increase of Stalker clickers that are unseen in listen mode, and as such close to impossible to get melee stealth kills on.
- Have the first two flashback segments (Ellie's birthday and clearing out the motel) in the beginning. You're reintroduced to the world and characters as you remember them. Leave the final flashback for late in the game to have intrigue as to why Ellie is so cold around Joel all of a sudden.
- After those flashbacks show Abby's first flashback. This will establish an oncoming threat, but in a way where we don't hate her by the time we see her humanized.
- Alternate between gameplay sections with Abby and Ellie: this way you won't be essentially forced to start again at level 1 halfway through the game. Show Abby fighting the Seraphites before killing Joel, flesh out her side of the story and all the characters we end up killing.
- Have Ellie and Abby's stories in Seattle parallel each other: the events in one influence another, instead of being completely separate.
The game could've gotten rid of Abby's flashbacks al together. Really what do they add other than showing Abby was the daughter of the surgeon, Abby and Owen's strained romance, and showing how Abby found Tommy? All of this could've just as easily been written into Abby's current narrative, while also not seeming so desperate to make her empathetic with that first flashback. If they want to make her the daughter of that surgeon, fine, but let the implication of that brew in the mind of the audience; don't force feed Abby's grief through a flashback.
But I actually really like how Ellie's and Abby's story don't intersect until the end of Day 3. It shows how Ellie's quest for vengeance doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but it also how Abby is completely unaware of what her actions unleashed. As far as she's concerned she got hers when Joel died, and just continues on with her life and having her own adventure, until those chickens come home to roost. You can see it in her face when she sees Ellie for the first time again at the theater; this girl that she left alive is suddenly here and she caused all of this.
If I had to rewrite the story I'd focus most of it on how the game follows up Joel's death, which is where I think the story is at its worst.
Have Ellie spend 2 or 3 months in Jackson trying to cope with what happened. As is Ellie is way too eager to set out for vengeance, telling Tommy they can't let them get away with this almost that same night. By showing her trying to pick her life back up but just not being able to, it creates more empathy for her motivation. This will also make her gradual decline actually feel more gradual.
I'd also cut away from Ellie's story to Abby's right when Ellie confronts Mel and Owen at the aquarium. This way Mel and Owen's fate is left a mystery until the end of Abby's Day 3, making the shock more impactful when she finds them dead. You'd have to find a way to fit in that scene of Ellie next to Dina right after showing how guilty she feels about what she did, but for the conflict between Ellie and Abby I feel Abby's perspective is more important.
One thing I noticed about TLoU2 's story and pacing is how many potentially great ideas are hidden inside, it just tried to do too many.
This is a complaint I've been seeing come up a lot recently with big movies and games. The amount of money being used for these mediums has never been greater but they're finding fewer justifiable uses for all of it.
I'm also willing to bet none of the people who made a hissy fit about Abby's physique ever questioned how Bill managed to keep his physique in the first game, alone, in a derelict town filled with infected, constantly patrolling and resetting traps, with presumably close to no sources of food.
Was it worth it? It’ll win Bafta/Siggraph/etc. awards of course but sadly these types of things are far from the main talking points of any game, if the meat and potatoes have too many issues.
What about Joel himself? Dude was built like brick. Most of the goons you fought in the first TLoU had biceps as big as Abby's.
Joel I can just about give a pass on. He looks more like a dude doing hard physical labor, not a bodybuilder, and I guess his circumistances could have him get enough food to maintain that physique. For the goons though, yeah, there's no excuse there either. Pittsburgh was probably filled with behind the scenes pig farms and crop fields for those dudes to look that jacked.
It's kinda sad that some people have to be reminded that attacking the actors over things their characters do just makes them look like assholes.
Death threats and such are never appropriate but proper criticism should be leveled at the writers/director if that's what really bothers them.
The thing is the general physiology of people. Men looked jacked when they get lean due to higher natural muscle mass full stop. A morbidly out of shape man will still have more muscle mass than an average woman just due to they human bodies are constructed.
So Joel being a strong lean dude, makes sense because of the activities he undertook in the outbreak. Smuggling, fighting, working his ass off with only passable amounts of food will make you lean and the constant patrols would do enough to keep Joel lean.
The same can be applied to the goons right? We would assume those goons are working to survive however they can, scavenging, moving heavy shit out of the way, fights, whatever. Just because you only see the last minute of their life before you shoot/strangle them, doesn't mean anything. If they exist in the world you can assume they are doing the same shit.
Essentially it boils down to the fact that men would look muscular and strong by the nature of the world in which they exist here. Where as Abby would need so much deliberate work, supliments, extra food portions, lots of sleep, etc etc, it just doesn't work. I've learned that Abby is modeled after some powerlifting woman, a real person, and okay that's fine but real power lifters are different than people in an apocalypse.
The Last of Us has always prided itself on make it's world feel real. Even the zombies aren't some supernatural virus or disaster but instead are a fictional evolution of a real fungus. It grounds itself so well over the course of the two games that something like Abby can take you out of it, because you believe the world so much that when something so minor doesn't make sense it stands out and breaks the cracks. And when those cracks start to break, they only highlight the rest of the problems the game has.
Look if Abby was a character in a Call of Duty game, or Metal Gear Solid, or anything like that, then I wouldn't say anything about it. I bring up Zarya from Overwatch again as a highlight of a muscled badass lady. Her existence in Overwatch makes sense to the world that game has built. It's a pretty straightforward concept.
If you think abby looks fine, then whatever, that's your call to make. I personally hated every aspect of her. From her design to her personality to her choices made in the game. I think she is one of the weakest characters in recent gaming memory, hands down. She's petty, her motivation sucks, she lacks any and all reasoning skills, and the whole core of The Last of Us 2 only happens because she's a idiot.
Minor side note, but i find it rather disturbing that with how much TLOU hammers home that Joel is a broken, dangerous and violent man who's left nothing mayhem in his wake, and has very much earned his dark fate...
That so many gamers seem to have missed the point entirely and latched onto how cool, awesome and badass he is, and are legitimately upset he died.
I'm fairly certain it's not how "cool, awesome and badass" he is that has people upset at his death.
I see nobody really making the argument that Joel was anything short of a bad guy. But the simple fact is, the first game made people love and root for him. Much the same way people love Walter White from Breaking Bad. Or Tony Soprano. Nobody liked them because they're good people. But you root for them anyway because they've become the likable bad guy.
And when you become a beloved character, you deserve better. Some build up, some respect, something believable. As fans as a bad guy, you know your favorite character has/should die. However you expect that death to come at some sort of climax, or have enough of a build up to act as a turning point or passing of the torch moment, something.
You don't just brain a dude out of nowhere. Essentially telling the audience "Fuck the character you like, you should like this stupid new character now." That's not how it works.
More or less what happened to Johnny Klebitz(GTA IV: Lost and the Damned) in GTAV during Trevor's first few missions. Yet no one complained neared as much as Joel. Then again, it was at least foreshadowed that things would inevitably go down hill for Johnny and his biker gang. I was saddened that happened though. My older brother did not exactly take it to well.
If that's what you got from that scene I don't know where your head was at.
And it's very apt you brought up Walter White and Tony Soprano, because both are also popular characters where the audience got so invested in them that they decided their actions were actually morally justified and that anyone who stood against them was the real bad guy. Like how what's happening to Laura Bailey now is the same thing that happened to the actress who played Skylar on Breaking Bad.
These types of characters breed a disturbing zealousness among fans, and I'm glad Joel got killed for that reason alone.
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When I first heard about the death threats being made against Laura Bailey, my first thought was "wow, these people really need a better grip on reality". Jim brings up the people who hate women in media and it made me think. These people never made these threats against the woman whose body Abby was based on. Probably because the people making these threats are cowards and that lady would crush them like insects if they did.