The Price of Vengenance: My Thoughts of the Narrative of TLOU: Part II (Spoilers)

[PhantomFear94]

So, I’ve finished The Last of Us: Part II (NG+ upgrades and abilities short of the platinum). Here are my thoughts, from someone who loved the first game and loved this one also.

 

This point of view is laden with significant spoilers, obviously. I orginally called this a critique, but it doesn't really do that - it's more my perspective on the narrative and the story of The Last of Us: Part II. I don't consider gameplay or mechanics at all, just the narrative. I'm not a professional writer or anything, but wanted to put this out there.

 

Consider this your last chance to turn away if you haven't finished either The Last of Us or The Last of Us: Part II. There really are significant spoilers for the entire game throughout.

Spoiler

 

TLOU Part II is the bravest game I’ve ever played, and I’m so very glad it exists. It would have been so easy for Naughty Dog to change very little and write a reasonably safe story. So many sequels do this. However, they do various things in Part II.

 

The thing that defines my love for this game, amdist the cathartic pain and conflicting feelings on characters, is how Naughty Dog completely blur the lines of morality. Most media has a binary paradigm of good and bad to the nth degree interwoven throughout its narrative. That paradigm doesn’t exist here. Instead, the game relies on perspective and personal circumstance to explain its story, and ‘justice’ becomes a meaningless endeavour that only cause’s pain. Yet, being the primitive emotional beings we are, Ellie and Abby both continue to search for justice until they lose more than they lost to begin with.

 

Very few people will leave this game having anything close to the same opinion they have of characters they have beloved for years, and that is an uncomfortable feeling. I feel this lack of satisfaction is why the audience reaction was different to the critical acclaim this game rightfully earned. I’m not going to criticise people who don’t like the narrative direction because ultimately it’s so subjective. All I will say is that I feel some people believed they were owed something based on the first game and review-bombed it with a complete unwillingness to hear the story out (there is no way those people could have gotten far through the game). I feel that after 7 years people felt entitled to a satisfying conclusion, and that if Joel had to die, it had to be for a purpose or as a hero. TLOU doesn’t work that way. If that isn’t your bag, then you’re fine to criticise it, but the meticulous and carefully crafted way in which this is delivered is incredible for the majority of the game.

 

Ultimately there are no heroes in this world, only survivors. Everyone is surviving in a cruel, dark world devoid of hope, and everything each character does has consequences beyond their obvious implications. This is another thing I loved about Part II. Some games present actual choices and the consequences of either/or choice are either implicit or implied in a large part before or shortly after making your decision. Ultimately, that isn’t how life works. TLOU does not do this in either game, so in this case, whatever the characters do or didn’t do cause problems down the road and actions they take on the path to what they perceive as the ‘bigger’ thing (i.e. Joel killing a seemingly random doctor to save Ellie (his ultimate goal) ends up in his own death and Ellie's spiral downwards). There is no winning, and that is repeatedly shown over and over again. You survive, at a cost, until you die. That’s it.

 

My fiancée worded this as ‘The Butterfly Effect Game’, which I think is a very fitting description of what happens. For each of the 3 main characters, this is their journey:

 

-          Ellie survives, but resents Joel for it for the rest of his life. She then loses him in front of her before she has the chance to heal their relationship, just as she was beginning to come to terms with what he had done for her. In her eyes it is her fault because she didn’t die for a cure to be made (this is later revealed to not be the reason). She kills everyone close to Abby, nearly getting her ‘vengeance’ before losing Abby at the end. She tries to move on with her partner and her child, cannot because of her trauma, seeks to end it again and when she finds Abby finds her in virtually the same situation as her and Joel were in. She spares them, at the cost of her own ticket to a better life, as Dina and JJ leave.  

 

-          Joel saves his surrogate daughter for the hospital, but at the cost of their relationship as he repeatedly conceals that her survival and Abby’s father’s death stopped the world getting a cure. Ellie feels her life has no purpose, as it was supposed to be to die for a cure. She is trying to forgive him when he dies, yet she clearly loves him dearly for her to go to all these lengths to avenge his death, as it ruins the prospect of ever re-uniting.  Ultimately he saves Ellie and gives her a chance at life, but at the cost of living life of meaning or happiness, as she is full of trauma, guilt and a vengeful existence, not in her eyes fulfilling her purpose of dying for the cure.

 

-        Abby kills Joel, but loses all her friends to Ellie’s wrath. Had she not avenged her father’s death, she wouldn’t have lost her place in her faction, her lover or her friends, as Ellie wouldn’t have set out on her personal vendetta. Without Joel’s death, though, she wouldn’t have saved Lev, who becomes her surrogate son the same way Ellie becomes Joel’s surrogate daughter in TLOU. At the end she and Lev are left together but in a destitute and traumatic situation. Ultimately Abby has the best chance at a future, because she at least still has Lev, which is something I think players will struggle to accept. However, like with Ellie, who couldn’t mend her relationship with Joel, Abbie couldn’t fulfil her true feelings with Owen, who had partially moved on with someone else (although it’s implied he was considering leaving with Abby).

 

I honestly believe that those who decide to skip TLOU (which I don’t recommend) and immediately go to Part II could end up siding with Abby as much as with Ellie. Of course, fans of TLOU (like myself) will side with Ellie because we love her character, and I would expect far more people to have played both than just Part II. But if you think about it for a while, Ellie isn’t any worse or better than Abby. They were both just desperate for the people they loved and lost and did utterly awful things to exact a revenge they were never going to fully get.

 

My biggest criticism that relegates this to a still GOTY-candidate-worthy 9/10 are following. Firstly, and probably most obviously, I don’t think Abby’s section needed to constitute ½ of the entire game and that is the most valid criticism I have seen online. I like that your play as Abby, and I like the ‘mirrored’ campaign as it re-enforced that lack of binary ‘sides’. However, Ellie is clearly the central character to this story, so I think it was too dominant. The game did a really good job as Ellie as segueing to flashbacks or shorter scenes, and I think Abby’s sections could have played a similar role – you play as Ellie after the confrontation in a desperate attempt to get to The Farm on the west coast with Dina, and you intersect in and out of Abby’s side of the past 3 days. To have ‘here is one half, here is another’ felt a bit too forced on the player, and I actually think it would have made you empathise with Abby’s side more. Instead, I believe a lot of players - from what I've read - felt 'when can I get back to playing as Ellie', so paid less attention to the back half of the game.

 

The only other criticism is that I feel the very end of the game was anti-climactic. This is partially intentional, I guess, as nothing about TLOU is very ‘monologue-esque’. It isn’t a huge deal, as I liked that it wasn’t this large over-the-top conclusion, but I felt the very end was a bit flat.

 

Overall I loved TLOU: Part II and its story. It was uncomfortable, painful, emotional and draining, but it forced me to consider aspects of human emotion, how I view character’s I love, and the price of vengeance and I love that it wasn’t a safe game which didn’t push the boat out.

 

Thanks for reading my ‘just another guy’ ramblings! I took 2 photo mode wallpapers I think look sick, if you want to download them, they are 1920x1080 and make sick PS4 wallpapers.

 

https://twitter.com/NoHeroes94/status/1275488539678031872/photo/1   

https://twitter.com/NoHeroes94/status/1276418648106827776/photo/1

 

 

 

Edited June 26, 2020 by PhantomFear94

[Bunkerbudy]

This is how you write a god damn review!

[BlackSabre500]

9 minutes ago, Bunkerbudy said:

This is how you write a god damn review!

 

I agree, this is an actually good review, nice and detailed and he understands both sides of the community, if it weren't for the spoilers i would recommend this review for people who are still on the fence with this game.

[bauer101]

This is such a refreshing and balanced review with a great analysis of the games story.

[ViperLance34]

The game's story would have been perfect if...

 

Spoiler

the game had succeeded in making us sympathize with Abby. Instead we hate her all they way thorugh Ellie's journey, hate her even more when the game forces us to play as her and we ultimately don't care for the good deeds she does during her campaign. My guess is Druckman severly underestimated our love for Joel, flaws and all.

 

On a side-note, Ellie sparing Abby's life in the end because of a flashback is Batman v Superman's "Save Martha" all over again.

 

I can see how someone who's never played the original game, or wasn't a fan might see Part II as a masterpiece, but I think long-time fans have every right to feel mad at the game.

 

41 minutes ago, PhantomFear94 said:

But if you think about it for a while...

 

That's the point. It's hard to think when you are so emotinally invested in something. You need to think and rationalize both characters' actions and consequences to make sense of it all, but even if you do (and I did) it will never wash away the bad taste it left in your mouth.

[Bunkerbudy]

37 minutes ago, LupusLance34 said:

The game's story would have been perfect if...

 

  Reveal hidden contents

the game had succeeded in making us sympathize with Abby. Instead we hate her all they way thorugh Ellie's journey, hate her even more when the game forces us to play as her and we ultimately don't care for the good deeds she does during her campaign. My guess is Druckman severly underestimated our love for Joel, flaws and all.

 

On a side-note, Ellie sparing Abby's life in the end because of a flashback is Batman v Superman's "Save Martha" all over again.

 

 

That is again just an opinion. Because it would make no difference to the story for me. Maybe it does for you, but that does not mean its better for everybody.

 

To be fair, I have heard al the things you said a lot by now. But here are my toughs about it.

Spoiler

"the game had succeeded in making us sympathize with Abby. Instead we hate her all they way thorugh Ellie's journey, hate her even more when the game forces us to play as her and we ultimately don't care for the good deeds she does during her campaign."

 

I don't think this is true at all. Do we really have to care for Abby to understand and grasp the story? I don't think so, I feel some hate towards her because of killing Joel.

But I also enjoy learning her part in all of this, I understand where she is comming from and her reasons are not in doubt. But still "yeah.." she killed Joel, so I will never fully like her.

 

"My guess is Druckman severly underestimated our love for Joel, flaws and all."

 

This I like because for me, the complete oposite is true.

Druckman knew exactly how much we loved Joel, that is why letting him get killed by a random stranger before Ellies eyes is such a strong emotional message.

Fans expect a strong emotional story from TLOU2, on the other hand the fans wanted more Joel and Ellie. My big question her is "How do you do that?"

 

How are you going to make a second story about Joel and Ellie that has the same emotions as the first game. IMO its not possible...

TLOU1 covered basicly everything there is to tell us. We know how they met, how they did not like each other at first, how they argueded, how they grew to each other, how they bonded and how they almost lost each other twice and how they saved each other, with the climax Joel Saving Ellie at all cost becaus of his emotions for her. How are you going to top this?

 

Letting Joel get killed this way creates soooo much emotions for Ellie and for the fans as well, cuz it looks like 50% of them are pissed as hell at Abby.

This only proves that this event/scene was so strong and that it worked like intended. Druckman made us care and he pulled the right string to get us all angry and emotional.

For example: What if they decided to let Tommy and Maria get killed. In response Joel and Ellie are going to get revenge. That would be so boring and not realy emotional.

 

 

"I can see how someone who's never played the original game, or wasn't a fan might see Part II as a masterpiece"

 

Playing this without TLOU1 would make TLOU2 really bad imo, it would just be realy random and generic.

 

"but I think long-time fans have every right to feel mad at the game."

 

Sure they have all the rights to not like the way the story went. But hating a game becaus it's not going als they wanted it to go is kinda weird IMO.

If I dont like a game and its from a franchise I love, I would just be dissapointed and move along ignoring the game. I would not go as far as to butcher it into the ground.

 

[PhantomFear94]

29 minutes ago, Bunkerbudy said:

  Reveal hidden contents

"the game had succeeded in making us sympathize with Abby. Instead we hate her all they way thorugh Ellie's journey, hate her even more when the game forces us to play as her and we ultimately don't care for the good deeds she does during her campaign."

 

I don't think this is true at all. Do we really have to care for Abby to understand and grasp the story? I don't think so, I feel some hate towards her because of killing Joel.

But I also enjoy learning her part in all of this, I understand where she is comming from and her reasons are not in doubt. But still "yeah.." she killed Joel, so I will never fully like her.

 

"My guess is Druckman severly underestimated our love for Joel, flaws and all."

 

This I like because for me, the complete oposite is true.

Druckman knew exactly how much we loved Joel, that is why letting him get killed by a random stranger before Ellies eyes is such a strong emotional message.

Fans expect a strong emotional story from TLOU2, on the other hand the fans wanted more Joel and Ellie. My big question her is "How do you do that?"

 

How are you going to make a second story about Joel and Ellie that has the same emotions as the first game. IMO its not possible...

TLOU1 covered basicly everything there is to tell us. We know how they met, how they did not like each other at first, how they argueded, how they grew to each other, how they bonded and how they almost lost each other twice and how they saved each other, with the climax Joel Saving Ellie at all cost becaus of his emotions for her. How are you going to top this?

 

Letting Joel get killed this way creates soooo much emotions for Ellie and for the fans as well, cuz it looks like 50% of them are pissed as hell at Abby.

This only proves that this event/scene was so strong and that it worked like intended. Druckman made us care and he pulled the right string to get us all angry and emotional.

For example: What if they decided to let Tommy and Maria get killed. In response Joel and Ellie are going to get revenge. That would be so boring and not realy emotional.

 

 

"I can see how someone who's never played the original game, or wasn't a fan might see Part II as a masterpiece"

 

Playing this without TLOU1 would make TLOU2 really bad imo, it would just be realy random and generic.

 

"but I think long-time fans have every right to feel mad at the game."

 

Sure they have all the rights to not like the way the story went. But hating a game becaus it's not going als they wanted it to go is kinda weird IMO.

If I dont like a game and its from a franchise I love, I would just be dissapointed and move along ignoring the game. I would not go as far as to butcher it into the ground.

 

 

This sums up my views really nicely, too. No hate, it's a respectable opinion you presented in your OP. I just think that you really should play 1 before 2, it's almost essential. My point was also that...
 

Spoiler

 

Without playing 1 it you have little content of the poignancy of Joel & Ellie's relationship, so you're likely not to hate Abby very much. On that basis I would find it interesting speaking to someone who hadn't played 1 but played 2 because Abby and Ellie would likely have equal support and hate, whereas you and I prefer Ellie, however irrational that is, because of 1.

 

 

I also think you can find plot points uncomfortable or against what your heart wants but still be an amazing story. I WANTED it to be more happy for all the characters because I love them, but the fact it didn't, it's still a great story.

Edited June 26, 2020 by PhantomFear94

[Bunkerbudy]

29 minutes ago, PhantomFear94 said:

I also think you can find plot points uncomfortable or against what your heart wants but still be an amazing story.

 

Jup, the story isn't perfect. I think it has room for improvements one of wich u mentioned already, make part 2 shorter. It overstayed its welcome witouth adding much needed information.

 

Spoiler

I would also have liked that actions Abby did where more connected to the current day story if that makes sense.

Not just some scénes and events that are only focused on showing that she is a good person. But events that also have more impact on what Ellie is doing.

 

End at last, they could have spend a bit more time on the start of the game, I understand it, but it lacked some details that would make it 110% believable.

 

All things togherther, the story lacked some pollish here and there, but overal its a realy good story IMO.

[Aradia117]

I’ve been mulling this over reading and watching both pro and con opinions and I think I have been wrong from the start.  I think I got swept up in the tsunami of rage at launch and didn’t allow myself to see the other side in an honest way.  I was definately on the never buy never support side but I’ve come to realize I’m mad I didn’t get my storybook ending in a world setting where that would be a total contrivance.  So yeah probably going to pick it up and hope that a TLoU3 happens so I can see how it all ends or are we going to 6 sequels.  So yeah I was wrong and now it’s time to give the sequel a chance.