The Last of Us Pt. II

[Spoiler warning: Do not read if you haven’t finished the game and intend to play it someday]

In the summer of 2013, I bought and played The Last of Us after hearing incredible things about the game. It was by far the most narratively engaging game I had ever played. The story was genuine, human, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching. I hadn’t seen that level of writing, direction, acting, and visual animation in a video game ever before. And it stuck with me. Its widespread appeal and critical acclaim single handedly spawned an entire generation of narrative focused video games that rivaled the best of Hollywood. Seven years later, Naughty Dog has released the successor to that legendary game, and I binged the hell out of it.

And wow, what a journey it was. After 35 hours with The Last of Us Pt. II, I was left with overwhelming feeling of heavy emotions. Sadness, sorrow, pity, and a lot more messy and complex emotions that I can’t put into words. The story of the game was absolutely phenomenal. It straight up outperforms the first one in terms of sheer narrative brilliance and plot. Aside from a couple of minor stumbles here and there, it somehow far surpassed all my expectations of what I thought a sequel to a game like The Last of Us could be.

The game opens with a sequence where Joel is brutally tortured and murdered by a group of outsiders. Right off the bat, the game is making a statement where it’s saying very clearly that this is about to get rough. It does not care about how much you love these characters or what feelings you have towards them. It’s about to tell a story and you’d better strap in for what happens, because boy is it a wild ride from there on.

Joel’s murder is the catalyst that sets off the main events of the game. Ellie travels to Seattle with a small crew of companions to try and hunt down the people that killed Joel. She manages to find and kill all but the main perpetrator, Abby. The game then pulls a sudden 180 and you find yourself playing as Abby. In a big twist, you now play the remainder of the game controlling Abby and playing as her going through her adventure in Seattle during the time that Ellie was on a revenge quest to hunt and kill her. It all ends in a climactic fight in the theater where Abby wins out but ends up sparing Ellie’s (and her friend’s) life after being persuaded by to stop by her companion Lev. Ellie then moves into a farmhouse with her girlfriend Dina and gets a lead about Abby’s whereabouts from Tommy. Ellie travels to Santa Barbara and finds Abby being taken in by a group enslaving humans. After setting Abby free, Ellie forces Abby to fight her by threatening Lev. Another fight ensues where Ellie eventually lets Abby go after realizing that this is how she’s going to forgive Joel for taking her from the hospital, where her life could’ve mattered through the development of a vaccine that could’ve cured the Cordyceps virus ravaging the world.

I absolutely loved this story. It paints a picture of how everyone’s feelings of vengeance and violence are completely justified from their point of view. Abby is only trying to get revenge on Joel for murdering her father, who was the surgeon that Joel killed while escaping with Ellie. Ellie then is trying to get revenge on Abby for killing Joel. The game making you play as Abby is a stroke of genius, because we see that her quest for revenge did absolutely nothing for her. She lost Owen, she gave up years of her life to build herself up in the WLF, and lost her morality entirely after leaving the Fireflies. It was completely not worth it. In fact, it’s really rough to play as Abby when you first get control of her, because she’s got nothing going for her. She’s not interesting, her personality is drab, and she’s just sorta…there. It’s not until she meets a couple of Seraphite outcasts in the form of Lev and Yara that she starts to find meaning in her life. It becomes her goal to protect them and be their family.

The game shows us that a revenge quest is not worth it in Abby’s story, and has us play through the journey of Ellie’s revenge quest before that. And lo and behold, the same thing happens to Ellie. She loses everything. She gives up her comfy farmhouse life with Dina and JJ, she feels responsible for Jesse’s death, she is responsible for Tommy’s leg injury (and Maria leaving him), and she fails to accomplish the task she set out to get done when she left Jackson. It’s unclear where she goes next and whether or not she finds meaning in something else, but it’s clear that she’s broken and hopeless at the end of the game, even failing to properly play the guitar in the final sequence.

I found it impressive how the game instills you with such a deep hatred for Abby after Joel’s death and then slowly has you coming around to realizing that her actions were entirely justified from her perspective. Let’s be real, Joel was the bad guy in the first game. He gave up the shot at a vaccine for humanity by removing Ellie from the hospital, a selfish yet entirely human act. That’s why he’s such a fantastic character. We want to hate him yet entirely empathize with his actions. The same can be said for Abby when you see events from her perspective. She even asks Owen at one point something along the lines of “When did we become such ruthless killers?”, to which Owen has no response. They bought into WLF propaganda as ex-Fireflies, and what other choice did they have? You can’t really blame them. The people of Seattle were essentially forced to pick between FEDRA or WLF, as is evident through the many notes found scattered throughout the game. Abby is, I would argue, an even better developed and executed character than Joel. You hate her even more than Joel and somehow empathize with her situation on some level. That is masterful.

Granted, it’s not without its pitfalls. For most of the second half of the game, I was questioning why on Earth the game was making me play as Abby. It takes a very long time for the payoff to come, and the only thing keeping you playing is the strength of the gameplay. I personally love these kinds of stealth games, so I kept playing, but I know many who will be put off by this. It’s not exactly a great sign for the game when players are questioning why something is happening for huge chunks of the game. There’s also an extremely jarring transition in the game where after you finish Ellie’s arc and Abby straight up shoots Jesse in the head during the confrontation in the theater, you’re immediately thrown into playing as young Abby. What the hell? You already hate this character so much for torturing and killing Joel, and now she shoots Jesse, and you want me to play as her again? It’s so immersion breaking at times. There is a slow understanding of her character and motivations later on, but it comes too late.

The acting and performance capture in the scenes is simply top notch. So much is said purely through glances, expressions, and gestures rather than spoken dialogue. I loved it. The obvious is left unsaid and characters always engage and interact with each other naturally. The game leaves a lot of gaps between major story beats and never fills them, leaving you to interpret what would’ve happened between then and now. It treats the player smartly and expects them to deeply engage with how someone in this world would behave, which I also loved.

Overall, the world of The Last of Us is also much more fleshed out. It was really incredible to see something that’s not New York or Los Angeles in such vivid detail. Seattle looks stunning as a post-apocalyptic world where nature has overtaken virtually everything. It was amazing to see the conflict between the WLF and the Seraphites. It was really incredible to catch up on the military occupation of Seattle by FEDRA and their eventual abandoning of the city after being driven out by the WLF (all of which was narratively exposed through notes scattered across the city).

Oh, and the visuals of the world. My goodness. The environments, the locations, the ambience. All 10/10. Everything has a sense of abandoned beauty to it, and it’s all rendered so immaculately. The environment artists at Naughty Dog have really outdone themselves. The game looks fantastic in the rain especially. Torrential downpours, thunderstorms, and overcast days in Seattle have a huge impact on the overall mood of the city.

Aside from all the story and world details, the gameplay is simply phenomenal. I adored how the game encouraged stealth not through consequences of failure, but through clever level design. Every encounter area is massive, with plenty of navigation and traversal options to sneak in and out of buildings, floors, and in/out of cover. It gives you so many ways of tackling the objectives that you’re incentivized to try and stealth your way through every area, until you inevitably get spotted, at which point you can bring out the big guns and try to clear out the enemies or simply run away back into stealth again. The level design here reminded me a lot of Hitman and Dishonored.

The game is a technical masterpiece on all levels. Transitions between cutscenes and gameplay are imperceptible, the animations are spectacular, and there’s little to no bugs at all in the game. It has been QA tested to hell and beyond and it shows. Checkpointing is very lenient so it’s not too difficult to quickly load up the most recent checkpoint. Load times are extremely speedy as well. The AI is actually smart this time around, covering each other on patrols with one faction using whistles to communicate various information with the group. Some of the groups even refer to each other by name when someone’s found dead, adding to the sense that these are real people and not plain old guards that you’re fighting.

It was also really cool to see that there was little to no handholding in any of the game’s systems. The levels are huge, but there’s no brightly painted path or clearly illuminated hallway pointing to the next objective. The game lets you get lost a little bit and explore around, which was really awesome to see in a triple-A game, as they’re notorious for clearly marking things like climbable ledges or platforms with a heavy coat of white paint (looking at you, Uncharted 4). This had to have involved heavy coordination with level designers and environment artists, and I have nothing but praise here.

Oh, and the crafting system makes a comeback. It’s still very lightweight and simple, still happening in real-time. But it’s done very well again. My one complaint is that you have to still find items like small or long gun holsters for basic quality-of-life features in the UI like quick-swapping weapons, but it’s not a big complaint. It’s just strange to tie basic things like this to exploration in the name of realism. But overall, the lightweight crafting system is fast, easy, intuitive, and responsive.

We haven’t talked about accessibility yet. My god, this game has the best accessibility settings I’ve ever seen. Low/high contrast mode, impaired vision and hearing presets, customizable difficulty settings, re-mappable buttons, tons of UI and subtitle display options, and so much more. This is a masterclass in accessible game design that many other games should look at to straight up copy in all future games.

The game also had some fantastic moments like the “giraffe” scene from the first game. Ellie and Joel’s flashback visit to the Wyoming dinosaur museum comes to mind, where they have a little adventure in a space capsule reminiscent of the arcade game in the Left Behind DLC for the first game. Abby and Owen’s first visit to the aquarium has you entering a massive hall displaying whales suspended with a school of fish hanging above the floor, which was fantastic to see. Overall, the pacing and intermittent flashback scenes do a great job in breaking up the flow and providing narrative context to the characters’ actions.

I also particularly loved one sequence in particular—when Abby goes to the lower floors of the hospital’s Trauma Center and Surgery to retrieve some medicine for Yara. The ambience is truly something else. It’s deathly quiet, there’s no sound, and there’s no lights. Yet, it’s terrifying. That’s how you know the game has succeeded. It has instilled a sense of fear in a totally quiet environment where nothing’s happening. Nora warns you ahead of time that it was ground zero for the outbreak in Seattle, so you’re fully expecting to be ambushed by infected or have some sort of chase sequence, but no, you’re treated to eerily quiet hallways and a heightened sense of anxiety and fear. The paranoia was real and the survival horror vibes were out in full force. It takes a lot for a game to be able to do this, so I applaud them heavily. I especially loved how it has you going through an area full of powered down doors with infected in them to eventually turning the power back on and having to fight your way through the infected now that you knew your way around the area. It also ends in a very crazy encounter, which came out of left field and surprised me in the best way possible.

So yeah, these are my thoughts on the game. It was such a fantastic experience overall. There’s been some criticism of the game’s plot, but much of that was due to some early leaks taken out of context of the game’s narrative. I think many people decided to permanently hate the game after finding out what happens to the characters, without ever giving it a fair chance by playing it themselves. There’s also those who have played it who didn’t enjoy it. I’m not sure what these people were expecting. Joel is a complex character, but he wasn’t some saint who would’ve gotten to live a relaxing life in Jackson until he died. His actions were going to come back to bite him at some point. He was literally the bad guy in the first game who still performed a very human act of love, so players’ relationship with him is quite complicated, to say the least.

I also think a lot of people were looking for a very generic Hollywood revenge plot of good versus evil, and it’s clear that the creators of this game have no intent of letting this world be that simple. Players are trying to find a villain to pin the blame on, but it becomes very obvious by the end of the game that there are no villains. Everyone’s violent actions are justified from their perspective. Players are used to a structured narrative with acts in the form of a regular film script from these games. But this game totally subverts those expectations with the flip-switch of a second playable character halfway through the game.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: can players love the game for what it is and not what they want it to be? I certainly can. The Last of Us Part II is a strange, special, and landmark game. Instead of allowing player choice like games in other genres do, it lets a story unfold and asks you to partake in it. It asks you to perform these actions and sit with them. It asks you to take it all in and absorb what’s happening in this world. It asks you to engage with an emotionally complicated story told from multiple perspectives split across a fragmented narrative. It takes extreme creative liberties and risks with the story, which is very rare in the triple-A industry. I cannot believe that they pulled it off again. I’m personally going to be replaying it yet again to get all the context that I previously missed, and I’m really looking forward to where this story goes from here on out.