I Couldn’t Finish The Last Of Us Part 2 | A Review | Solely My Opinion
When The Last of Us (TLOU) came out 7 years ago, I searched through every YouTube gameplay channel I could that had a bunch of parts uploaded because there was no way I could afford the game nor a console for it, so watching gameplays will suffice. I watched a couple of parts to get myself started and soon found myself binging as much as the creator put out.
The storyline was heartbreaking yet gripping, the gameplay was exciting albeit sometimes nonsensical when the NPCs were… less discrete than they should be but the ending was *chef’s kiss*.
If you don’t know anything about TLOU, you play as the character Joel, who lost his daughter during the initial Cordyceps fungus outbreak where it turned humans into zombies of different stages (the first being a normal zombie called ‘runners’ and the third stage ‘Clicker’ if you’re exposed to more spores — they eventually introduced 3 more stages with ‘Rat King’ being the final boss). And after surviving it, he became a smuggler.
He was tasked to smuggle a 14-year-old girl Ellie who has a bite mark but did not turn into a zombie — meaning she’s immune. He has to smuggle her across the US to a facility run by the Fireflies who wanted her so that they could create some kind of cure against this outbreak with her DNA.
We basically play as him, with different weapons from guns to bats. We could craft certain explosives and med-kits. Ellie is also equipped with a weapon and plays alongside us, occasionally assisting in a double-kill.
But honestly, the gameplay is… pretty simple. What makes it more unique and added flavour was the storyline and the graphics design. And oh boy was it really good.
Every cut scene you saw felt like you were watching a full-fledged animated movie. You could even watch all the cutscenes strung together at the end of the game, giving rise to about a 2 hour movie. The design, artwork and plot was just jaw-droppingly beautiful.
To me 7 years ago, the concept was unique. The storyline was gripping. The design was excellent. The direction of every cut scene paved way for a different kind of game design: one with an excellent storyline and graphics but ok gameplay.
Now, let me warn you here: If you don’t know what happened at the end of TLOU, let alone haven’t played (or like me, watched) The Last Of Us Part 2 (TLOU2), you might want to miss out on this review until you’ve at least played until the biggest plot point in TLOU2 (and you’ll know what I mean by the biggest plot point) — because yes, I will be spoiling, so you’ve been warned!
To set the scene, at the end of TLOU, Joel and Ellie does reach the Fireflies’ lab, located in the St. Mary’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. There, as Ellie prepares for surgery, falling into deep sleep, Joel learns that the only way the Fireflies could even find a cure was if they cut open Ellie, killing her.
Having bonded with Ellie over the course of the cross-country trip, he runs into the surgical room, kills off all the surgeons (yikes) and leaves with Ellie in his arms.
After leaving the hospital, Joel lied to a waking Ellie about the Fireflies not needing her because she wasn’t the right person for the cure, but eventually she finds out the truth because she took a trip back to the hospital to find evidence in TLOU2.
4 years after TLOU left off, TLOU2 begins in Jackson, Wyoming where Joel, Ellie and Tommy (Joel’s brother) resides in a surviving community. Joel and Ellie’s relationship now strained from what happened 4 years ago.
Ellie was recently placed on pair patrols with a new character Dina (who eventually becomes Ellie’s love interest) and we begin the gameplay with them going around the different patrol points, finding hordes of zombies coming closer to Jackson as the zombies were migrating due to the weather.
For a split moment in the gameplay, we suddenly hop into a new character Abby. Man, she’s buff as heck. I almost thought it was some kind of modelling render flaw but naw, she somehow found steroids during the post-apocalypse and you know she’s been training hella hard, so major props to her.
Abby was with her group of friends, hiding out in a mansion close enough to Jackson and they were there for a reason. Owen, a previous lover of Abby’s (who got another character, Mel pregnant, who for whatever reason was also in that group hiding out in the mansion despite her being preggo), took Abby out one morning to show her that they were near Jackson.
It didn’t take long to put two and two together to understand that Abby was looking for Joel. At the last minute, Owen backed out of wanting to pursue Joel and the people in Jackson because of Mel’s situation. He wanted to take everyone back because they didn’t have any plan in mind. Abby obviously got pissed and so she left her entire team in pursuit of Joel alone.
She eventually found herself in a huge horde of Runners and while trying to out run them, she was saved by Joel and Tommy, who were on their pair patrols. They eventually escaped the horde and Abby brought both of them back to the mansion.
And here, the biggest plot point happened and also when I started to lose interest in the entire series.
We switch back to Ellie and found out from another new character, Jesse, that Joel and Tommy did not reach their designated exchange point. The 3 split up, yes, all of them separated, to find both of them… even though there were clear signs of hordes of zombies moving into Jackson!! SIGH.
Eventually Ellie found the mansion where Abby held Joel and Tommy hostage. As Ellie snuck in, she saw a battered and bloodied Joel in the hands of Abby, while Tommy was knocked out cold in the corner.
There was a huge struggle as we watched from Ellie’s perspective, Abby killing Joel.
All the anger, disbelief and plenty of other emotions bubbled to the surface as I thought: what the fuck? Did they actually fucking kill off Joel?!
I was in disbelief the entire time Ellie and the people in Jackson came to terms with Joel’s death. And at this point, it felt almost pointless to continue watching. I mean, I watched TLOU simply because I loved the relationship Ellie and Joel had. Despite it being strained at the start of TLOU2, I was hoping we could see progress in their relationship. But no?! Instead they kill off such an important character and placed Ellie on a killing spree??!! INSERT ANOTHER SIGH, AND A REAL BIG ONE.
After Joel’s death, Tommy leaves Jackson in pursuit of Abby and her team. Ellie and Dina follow in his tracks and found themselves in Seattle.
At this point, the plot simply became: Get justice for Joel by finding Abby in Seattle or at least find Tommy and bring him back. But we’ll always narrowly miss Abby or Tommy and instead Ellie and Dina does something else.
The entire gameplay became: go through this portion of the map — which, ok, props to the map designer because they really made the map huge. There are multiple areas within the entire game where you could probably spend half an hour to an hour just exploring every building that’s accessible — to fight zombies or loot, before you continued with the main storyline.
But that’s all you do — you loot around for things, be stealthy, solve some simple puzzles that required you to move things around so that you could hop a fence, kill people with various weapons, create silenced weapons, create med-kits, rinse and repeat.
Although there’s an added category of being able to ‘level-up’ Ellie by feeding her medication you found (yikes, I know, just popping random-ass meds?! In the post-apocalyptic world?!) or picking up some kind of book/magazine that unlocks a secret category— she could hear better, she could walk more silently, she could be more resilient to attacks, etcetera — all of that was interesting until you realise that that’s pretty much all you do.
It got so fucking boring. And quick.
It also doesn’t help that none of your choices you make really impacted the gameplay in any shape. Sure, there are some flashback scenes that you’ll only manage to see if you explored, which is kind of nice — rewarding the player for exploring. But apart from that slight reprieve you get from the flashbacks… it doesn’t change much. Ellie doesn’t back out of her pursuit, or learn any new information that could’ve changed the outcome of the story. You couldn’t even say ‘no, Ellie, let’s not do this anymore. Let’s just find Tommy and turn back.’
And this goes on until you finally meet Abby, pointing a gun at Tommy, because Ellie killed Owen, a preggo Mel and some of Abby’s other friends — all of which you couldn’t stop Ellie from doing.
AND YOU KNOW WHAT? It gets worse.
Because now you play as Abby for the rest of the game. You learn about Abby’s history from her own flashbacks. You learn that Abby’s father was one of the surgeons killed by Joel in his fit of rage trying to save Ellie.
And even though Abby learns that Ellie was never consulted on whether Ellie could give up her life for the cure because Abby’s father insisted that Ellie is the cure and they need to do the experimentation soon and not delay it, she still doesn’t empathise much for Ellie.
Instead, you’re almost ‘forced’ to sympathise for Abby simply because you are now the character. Simply because you are now forced to see what she sees and forced to understand why she did what she did.
It’s almost this deep shit that the game developers are trying to talk about: if the story was written in Abby’s perspective from the very beginning, you would’ve been angry at Joel too. And whilst I understand wanting to give a conflicting perspective… I personally think it fell flat.
They’ve built up too much of Ellie & Joel in the first game and now they’re trying to squeeze an alternative perspective in the second half of TLOU2. Barely even giving the same quality of character development they did in the first game for me to even give a shit.
It doesn’t help that the gameplay didn’t change much either once we started playing Abby. It was still the same: scavenge, loot, create things, kill.
At this point I just completely dropped off of watching TLOU2 and instead decided to just read the ending for myself because man, I really cannot stand this anymore.
And when I spoiled the ending for myself… it’s clear that as the player, you never got a chance to ever control Ellie’s fate or decisions and it is so nonsensically infuriating.
After we finish Abby’s POV gameplay, we go back to Ellie’s POV again and Abby lets Ellie go with Tommy and Dina back to Jackson, as long as they don’t come back to Seattle.
Ellie lives with Dina on a farm a little outside of Jackson and it’s almost like as if it’s a really nice ending where they SHOULD HAVE STOPPED AT. But nope.
Ellie has PTSD from what she did in Seattle and of Joel and after having a sweet period of peaceful life with Dina, she instead insists on leaving Dina (despite Dina begging Ellie not to) to go back to hunt Abby down. CAN I INSERT ANOTHER LOUD ASS SIGH AGAIN?!
Abby and Ellie fight and Ellie loses some fingers or something before they truly call it quits and Abby leaves Seattle for some other destination while Ellie goes back to the farm only to realise Dina is no longer there.
And that’s how it all ends.
I’m glad I didn’t waste my time watching more of the same.
Now, TLOU2 still has amazing visuals, don’t get me wrong. There are multiple times when I would stop a video and just gawk at the set design. The way the buildings rendered, the way the light hits, sometimes even just the character design and the way each character moved was just so enchanting and life-like — it’s absolutely stunning.
But, it still doesn’t make me forget about the fact that TLOU2 was infuriating. I felt pissed most of the time because it felt like TLOU2 was a copy of TLOU but a different, worser plot point.
At least in TLOU, you didn’t feel the need to control Joel or Ellie’s character that much because it’s a very simple concept: you play as Joel, go to the Fireflies’ hospital and drop Ellie off. There’s no conflict (until the end, at least), there’s no reason for you to even make a decision for them. You just played and enjoyed the storyline as it is — a lovely father-daughter relationship blooming between Joel and Ellie as they spend time together.
But in TLOU2, when the plot goes up in flames at some parts of the game, I just so desperately wished we could’ve controlled their decisions. Made a difference. Change the course of the game and see something else.
And maybe it’s because TLOU2 was just too similar to TLOU that it bored the heck out of me once I realised it’s going to be the same shit again.
There’s some speculation that because TLOU2 is named ‘Part 2’, that maybe there’s a ‘Part 3’, but for the life of me, please don’t create a Part 3. Just leave this shipwreck as it is and call it a day.
If you’ve watched or played TLOU2 and actually enjoyed it, let me know what you enjoyed! I would really like a different perspective on this because damn, this game was disappointing to me.
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