TLOU2 Review Thread
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I'm sure it'll be at least decent judging from the Metacritic scores but I'm going to wait until it goes down in price after the last few premium releases where I felt a bit disappointed at full price. I'll defo get it at some point.
I actually did read it, and fully realized what their angle was. That’s fine, but again Naughty Dog themselves stated they weren’t making a game they wanted everyone to like and that simply aimed to please fans, and that they wanted people to feel uncomfortable playing it. They also wanted a particular narrative for players to follow, meaning player agency and self authorship wasn’t in the equation.
I get why Polygon said what they did, but the aim of the story wasn’t meant to have a silver lining. It was meant to show the ugly side of humanity, even if it did seem excessively grim and hopeless perhaps to drive a point home. I have no idea how it ends, but plenty of others seemed to be ok with it. Either it’s not so bad or most people accepted the approach.
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Actually, it matters quite a lot. Words are afforded their meanings exclusively by usage. So when the usage of a term overwhelmingly points in one direction, the term takes on that meaning.
Nobody's saying that we should pretend anything doesn't exist. Choosing what language we employ so as not to deride or insult others is not pretending anything; it's just avoiding unnecessary harm or stigma.
For the audience, it means stereotypes and pandering. Cater to their inner Id to speak for stimuli.
Metroid rewarded you with fanservice art for successful speedruns.
Is that a problem though? Is there a reason why such an approach wouldn't work?
In Persona 5 the main villain is very clearly a populist demagogue. Its crystal clear that the creators of Persona 5 have a lot of contempt for both that sort of politician and the type of people that vote for them. I even heard it said that the creator claimed Shinzo Abe was their direct inspiration. The political stance is obvious yet it didn't seem to detract from Shido as a villain at all. If anything Shido being so very topical in an age were wacky populists rise to power anything really enhanced him. He felt more of a threat because multiple versions of him actually rose to power, even if those real life versions lack the inception style mind dimensions of the Persona series.
And Black Panther also makes a very clear stance yet its one of the most successful Marvel movies out there which is saying something.
Ok maybe im not being clear enough with my points and i apologize.
I guess the reason why this is such a deal is their emphasis on her sexuality. They want you to know going in that Ellie is a Lesbian, and we can talk about the dlc all you want but you cant assume everyone has played that or even knows about it. So they have to make it front and center, why? Because they are making a center point of her character.
It would be one thing if you go on this adventure and Ellie is chasing after someone named...lets call her Riley. The audience never sees Riley for the first five or six hours of the game but eventually there is a campfire scene with other charcters and Ellie is caught looking at a photo. It is then revealed that Riley is another woman and Ellie is gay. But up till that point the audience doesnt know and they are able to get invested in Ellie's other characteristics and her story.
Then her being gay is played off as flavoring on top and already developed character personality pie and as such is no big deal. It is just a cool little thing about her on top of all the other things about her.
You see the difference right?
Throughout this thread people have asked, "Why is Ellie being gay a big deal?" And it is a big deal because Naughty Dog is MAKING it a big deal. They want us to think it is a big deal.
When in truth it doesnt fucking matter that much. Doing it my way would make homosexuality less of a deal for the vast majority of players as they already had this prior investment with Ellie and the reveal being played off in such a subtle way also goes to show the players that she is gay and so what? It doesnt change anything about the person youve gotten invested in.
Thats how you encourage acceptance. Not by slapping people in the face with it. You can still have your dance scenes and meaningful bonding between the girls later after youve been eased into it. After you started to root for Ellie to save her girl.
Im not trying to get rid of homosexual representation, im trying to make it fit naturally into place so we can all stop seeing it as a big deal.
This review had a good explanation about the violence that Polygon had a problem with. To summarize -
By the end of the game, it was a real challenge to keep pushing the buttons and carrying out the nastiness I had to - kind of like in graphically violent movies where you sometimes want to look away.
Writer Halley Gross told me that this game is about "the cyclical nature of violence and the effects of violence and trauma on the soul".
"We need to honour that violence. We're trying to paint incredibly grounded characters, so we need to honour that with grounded, accurate violence that's true to this hostile world."
Director Neil Druckmann added: "This is a story of trauma, redemption and empathy.
"The themes of The Last of Us Part II are based on a universal truth - that just as we are capable of unconditional love, we are also capable of unforgivable hate. And those two feelings are inextricably linked."
The relentless focus on vengeance and brutality mean this game will be too unpleasant an experience for a lot of people - but if you get onboard with it, it does what it does in that regard better than any game I've played before.
...But in the end, the meaninglessness of revenge is fully realised and that, by definition, means that as a player it feels a little meaningless.
It's also much more of a downer than the troubling, but overall happy, ending of the first game - that's also intentional, of course.
But then, if you want a rousing, chest-beating distraction to play, you wouldn't be thinking about this game at all - or reading this review.
By the end of the game, it was a real challenge to keep pushing the buttons and carrying out the nastiness I had to - kind of like in graphically violent movies where you sometimes want to look away.
Writer Halley Gross told me that this game is about "the cyclical nature of violence and the effects of violence and trauma on the soul".
"We need to honour that violence. We're trying to paint incredibly grounded characters, so we need to honour that with grounded, accurate violence that's true to this hostile world."
Director Neil Druckmann added: "This is a story of trauma, redemption and empathy.
"The themes of The Last of Us Part II are based on a universal truth - that just as we are capable of unconditional love, we are also capable of unforgivable hate. And those two feelings are inextricably linked."
The relentless focus on vengeance and brutality mean this game will be too unpleasant an experience for a lot of people - but if you get onboard with it, it does what it does in that regard better than any game I've played before.
...But in the end, the meaninglessness of revenge is fully realised and that, by definition, means that as a player it feels a little meaningless.
It's also much more of a downer than the troubling, but overall happy, ending of the first game - that's also intentional, of course.
But then, if you want a rousing, chest-beating distraction to play, you wouldn't be thinking about this game at all - or reading this review.
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Right, but this doesn't sound like TLOU2 is the "Schindler's List of gaming"(I swear, whoever came up with that comparison probably neither did play enough games, nor watch enough movies.), but rather anything from some exploitative grindhouse flick at worst, to i dunno, Cronenberg's "History of Violence".
Or "The Road". Again.
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There's a difference between someone being a villain for things, and also being a demagogue (mainly something which is used as a part of characterizing him as a bad person in p5's case) and someone being a villain BECAUSE he is a demagogue. The reason the villain in p5 is bad is because he is an abuser and frames people and uses his authority to get away with corruption, which is something that's completely independent from his political identity and tactics, it is just evil in a vacuum.
The reason why you fight him is that, not his politics. His politics basically are there as flavoring rather as the core ingredient. It's the same thing with the politician confidant (which I was calling Bernie in my head as I was playing the game) you help him cause it's just kind of a gig and he's a nice guy and you're just cool like that, you aren't necessarily motivated because you agree with his politics explicitly.
But yeah going back to Shido, I was playing p5 in Japanese which means I was playing it before the 2016 election (it came out in Semptember 2016 in japan) which may have to do with my interpretation of the character but at the time people weren't nearly as Trump-crazy as they were when the USA version of p5 came out half a year later. People still thought he couldn't win and was a joke back then so I didn't see Shido as all that nefarious. Nothing compared to the Yakuza guy for example. I was about to get around to playing Royal soon though (these past few months have been crazy busy with a ton of games so I left royal for last because it's a 200 hour game lmao) so I'll see how I feel about him this time around. But going by what I have played already, Shido is more like "this is an abusive asshole, so of course that's what his politics are" and less like "this is someone with these political views, so of course he's an abusive asshole". The abuse comes first, the politics is not even really relevant most of the time.
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One trailer.
ONE. TRAILER.
Is this really putting "such an emphasis on her sexuality?"
I really don't get why this keeps being brought up.
Using DLC for story isn't uncommon. And even if people don't play the DLC, in the age of the Internet, they can easily look up the plot details.
If this was only in the American Dreams comic then maybe, but even then, if the 'plot point' is that Ellie is gay, then that's something that the series could easily introduce.
Again, one trailer. It's hardly "central."
Riley? You mean, the same Riley that canonically succumbed to the infection?
Semantics aside, there's nothing wrong with the story you proposed, but I really don't get what the angle is. It's like, you have one story (the canonical story of LoU 2), then you propose an alternate story, and the crux of it seems to be that you want it to focus more on Ellie's sexuality.
Look, far be it from me to tell people what to do in a rewrite (fanfiction is full of the stuff), but this seems like an iffy basis for the rewrite. Make LoU 2 an entirely different story because of vaguely described reasons. And again, if Ellie was hetrosexual, would we even be having this conversation?
I think the Internet made a big deal out of it, not Naughty Dog.
I remember the very first trailer for The Force Awakens. In that trailer we see Finn for the first time. A black man who's a stormtrooper. A portion of the Internet flipped their shit even then, saying that Disney was "forcing diversity" or "stormtroopers aren't black!", or god knows what else. So, was Disney making a "big deal" out of this, or were fans?
If it doesn't matter much, why make it matter?
Oh no, those poor players who need their trigger warnings to deal with the fact that their character is gay. Shock, horror, sound the trumpet, I hear the hoofbeats of Four Horsemen...
Okay, to make something clear. I don't see an issue with the story you presented in of itself. I just don't understand the need for it.
I'll give you an example. I've posted a fair number of adaptations/novelizations over the years, and in those stories, I've made alterations to canon. One of those novelizations was a novelization of Precursor, the prequel DLC campaign to StarCraft. In the original game, it uses the standard format of a silent player character. You're referred to as "Lieutenant," and remain as such over the course of five missions. Name, gender, backstory, none of this is specified. When I novelized the campaign, I made changes to this format. The lieutenant was made into an actual character, but I kind of divided the character up. At the start, a lot of the lieutenant's actions are shared by a sergeant - she's the CO of the platoon, he's the NCO, and they both answer to a captain of a company. By the end of the story, the lieutenant has become the company captain, as the captain died, and the sergeant dies as well. The reason I made this change can be boiled down to two reasons. First, by the end of the campaign, you're conducting large battles, so it makes no sense for a lieutenant to be leading them, since lieutenants lead platoons, so part of the story involves Alpha Squadron getting reinforcements that tie in with Duke's arrival (in the campaign, a lieutenant is controlling a general unit - go figure). Second of all, the climbing of the ranks represents the lieutenant's character development, going from being somewhat meek, to hardening up, to being scarred by the experience, and disgusted at the Confederacy as they sweep the rug under the whole affair at the story's end.
Whether this makes for a better story than the original isn't the point. The point is that I can appreciate the need/desire to change a story to something a person believes is genuinely better. The problem here, is that I don't see the catalysing issue. It seems that in your view, Naughty Dog is simultaniously making Ellie's homosexuality too explicit (the trailer), while simultaniously making it not explicit enough (the game's actual story). It feels like a microcosm over the whole representation thing. If you don't deal with their traits explicitly, it's tokenism. If you do make it explicit, it's pandering. And yet, this only seems to happen with homosexual characters. Hetrosexual characters don't seem to get their own romance protested.
Yet your story makes it a bigger deal than the current one...
Look, if I'm getting this right, we seem to have similar views, but different methods. We seem to both agree that homophobia is bad, and that the ideal end goal is where same sex relationships in fiction aren't seen as anything odd, right? I think where we differ is that your view is that to achieve that, a work of fiction should focus on the character's sexuality, emphasis put on it in a manner that people can open up to it in time. My view is that emphasis shouldn't be placed on it, and it be treated as normal.
And to make it clear, there's certainly stories that can work where the character's homosexuality is the focus - again, Boy Erased, where it's the story of the protagonist being put into gay conversion therapy. There's absolutely room for these stories. But Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse story. So in that context, I don't get the issue as to why Ellie's sexuality has to be made a big deal, and why it can't be something that's accepted. You COULD make it a big deal - your story demonstrates how - but I don't get why your take is inherently superior to the story Naughty Dog actually penned. Again, ND has never done a romance story before, but has had stories with romance in them (Jak, Uncharted, etc.), and that wasn't an issue then. Why is it an issue now?
I have still not forgotten that part with TFA. Also, there was this one dude on the Easy Allies who made a big stink about Ellie being lesbian, that he got justifiably got banned from the forums. He was known for starting shit, and causing trouble or just plain mean in general.
You can't measure the impact or intent based the number of trailers that feature the scene, nor how much of the scene makes up the trailer's runtime, or anything that involves looking at numbers. Marketing doesn't work like that. No advertising professional sits down and say "We'll put this scene here, and since it's only 5% of the trailer's runtime, people will only think it's a little side thing".
Go watch any trailer with a "stinger" after the title card. Chances are, those are going to be short, seconds long clips that either drop or hint at a big, crowd-pleasing reveal in order to get you interested in the movie. Those aren't intended to be just side things. Those are often THE. MOST. IMPORTANT. THING.
For example:
After the title-drop at 3:30, more footage plays and it lingers on some guy. I've never watched a Fast and Furious, so I have no idea who that is, but I'm sure it made long-time fans of the series squee in delight. THAT'S THE POINT. And you can't say "oh, he's not important, he's just a side character, nobody cares about him, he's not even important to the movie, he only appears in the trailer for a few seconds" because LOOK HOW LONG THE CAMERA LINGERS ON HIM! HE'S VERY OBVIOUSLY A BIG DEAL!
It's not a numbers game. It doesn't work that way. You can prove it's "a side thing" by appealing to numbers.
Anyone who makes the “*insert movie title* of gaming” statement is shortsightedly anxious for gaming to get its mainstream cred at best, and flat out irresponsible at worst. Especially regarding a movie like Schindler’s List of all things. Like everyone I’ll have to wait til I play it to really know why of course, but I get so tired of this whole comparison of games to movies. It’s obvious why it happens, but we should be celebrating what games can do beyond the capabilities of other mediums, which it seems this sequel could be an example of.
I guess. 0_0
Within the context of the trailer itself, it's obviously a big deal. In the context of all the trailers the game has had? Not so much.
That's still playing a numbers game. One of the purposes of having different trailers is to focus on different things and sell the game in different ways. Some are "story trailers". Some are "gameplay trailers". Some are just "teasers" to announce the game. The first "trailer" was essentially a "teaser" and didn't reveal anything except "Yep, we're still in the same setting and Ellie is older now".
You can't write a detail off as "minor" based on how many scenes in a trailer it appeared in, or how many trailers in all the total trailers the detail appears in.
How many trailers even had scenes showing that you play as Abby? None. But we know, thanks to the leaks, that you play as this other character quite a lot. If your logic were valid, the trailers would show everything in proportion to how "big a deal" it is in the game. Clearly we can see this isn't true.
So the N word is a term of familiarity then and not a racist slur? Or that literal instead now means figurative?
Refusing to own a word, accept it, and take pride in it, is pretending it doesn't exist.
And all that does is lead to people finding new words that eventually take on the same connotations. I think we will have to agree to disagree on this.
No, that word is still overwhelmingly used as a racist slur.
Actually, the colloquial sense of "literal" is recognised in almost every dictionary, including the OED and Merriam-Webster, and has appeared in dictionaries since 1909. It's a prime example of terminology taking on additional senses through widespread usage.
Merriam-Webster said:
Bollocks.
And no, I don't mean that in the sense of "testicles". You'll notice that my response only becomes understandable if you ignore its literal definition, and look to common usage instead.
It does raise an interesting question theoretically - if a work presents a theme that you disagree with, how fair is it to criticize the work based on that theme, and if so, how far will it colour your judgement? Because I can certainly name works of fiction whose theme I fundamentally disagree with, and generally, that would decrease my appraisal of them.