The Cycle Of Violence
Developed By Naughty Dog, Played On Launch Model PS4
Massive spoilers to follow.
Note: I should reiterate, if you send antisemetic remarks or death threats to actors or writers who make art you don’t like, as has happened with this game, you’re an actual piece of shit.
It happened again. Fuck I’m so mad that it’s happened *again.*
In yet another dumb internet culture war, in which people have taken sides to spend literal months arguing over the merits and relative success of a piece of media, placing far too much importance on some video game or movie, and I’ve once again ended up on the side of dumb internet chuds, just as happened with the Ghostbusters reboot or the Batwoman TV show. I now have to count myself among the ranks of absolute fucking weirdos and dipshits once more and that frustrates the hell out of me, that realization has ruined my day more than once.
And it’s all thanks to a little game called The Last Of Us Part II.
I don’t think this game is the worst sequel ever as some claim, I mean how could I when Highlander II: The Quickening exists? I sure as hell am not about to scream bloody murder about how developer Naughty Dog and game director Neil Druckmann betrayed or lied or what have you. Go and browse the /r/thelastofus2 subreddit and you’ll come across some of the most ridiculous hyperbole I’ve ever seen about a game, everyone is yelling in there about how Neil Cuckmann (what a witty insult guys, bang up job) broke the law and ruined a franchise in one fell swoop. No, you dinguses, Naughty Dog did not commit federal crimes with its marketing for this game, and this sure as hell isn’t the worst PS4 exclusive, if I think about it this isn’t even really a bad game.
That doesn’t mean I like it, though.
What makes The Last Of Us Part II so frustrating to me is that there are great things in this game. Its moment to moment gameplay can still feel incredible, and in terms of visual and sound design it’s absolutely stunning. But when it comes to its story, it feels like something a very full of himself college sophomore would write and overwrite to the point of exhaustion. What the game seems to treat as heavy themes or deep story moments come off as obvious to anyone with even a hint of media literacy, and the game takes its sweet ass time delivering on those ideas. Godawful pacing makes a game that’s nearly ten hours too long feel even longer as the game hard cuts away from the unsatisfying and miserable story it was trying to tell to tell an even worse one that feels totally pointless in the context of the game as a whole and the series as at large. The Last Of Us Part II ends up feeling completely indulgent, and it wears out its welcome long before the credits roll.
At first the game started with a lot of promise, there was a good six or seven hour period at the beginning where I kind of loved this game and thought things were on the right track. Set four years after the events of the first game, Part II has Ellie and Joel settled in Jackson, the town Joel’s brother Tommy and his wife settled in after he and Joel had a falling out. One day while on patrol, Joel and Tommy run into a group of militia who kill Joel as revenge for the rampage he went on to save Ellie at the end of the first game. Spurred on by revenge, Ellie follows the militia to their home in Seattle, specifically to confront Joel’s killer Abby, the daughter of the doctor who would have killed Ellie in the first game had Joel not killed him first. As Ellie explores Seattle, mistakes are made and revenge is had, only for the game to go completely off the rails as it spends hours and hours from the perspective of Abby, the antagonist, showing an entirely different story before finally resolving this one in an underwhelming and unsatisfying climax.
Before I dive into this personal therapy session masquerading as a review, I think I need to stress that there are things in this game that are really good. As with the first game, the combat feels absolutely fantastic, arguably better than the first game at times even. Every shot from a rifle or shotgun has so much weight to it, and whenever you hit someone and kill them with a melee weapon it’s almost like you can feel the blow through the controller, the force of the bullet or metal pipe ramming into their skull. Fights are tense, brutal, and are constantly forcing you to improvise and think on your feet. Much like the first game, you’ll end up feeling like a big brained genius whenever you set traps and get guys to fall into them, it always put a smile on my face whenever I managed to get a guy to stumble head first into waiting improvised explosives and gibbliet himself. Explosives feel a lot more powerful and visceral here, and the explosive arrows and traps will go off in a loud, thunderous bang that will turn a guy’s lower torso basically to red mist. All of this is mayhem is hammered home with fantastic audio design. Guns are sound great and powerful, and enemies will call out to each other as you face off against him, not unlike the fantastic call out audio in the shooter classic F.E.A.R., though that game might’ve been a bit better at this trick. A neat little detail that this game has however is that enemies will all have names, which means that when you brutally murder them their buddies will scream their names out in despair. I’ll admit, the first time this happened I felt real bad, pulling the trigger to headshot a woman with a revolver only for their friend to scream out “Beth no!” made me feel like a real shitbag. I mean, I still laughed, but it was a great moment. Beyond that are some of the quieter moments where the audio shines through. Rain and thunder in Seattle, the wind howling in a blizzard, all of it helps to set the world and feel incredibly immersive.
From a design standpoint there are a few other changes from the first game that were for the better. Crafting, weapon upgrades, and character upgrades all return from the first game and I’d argue each of them is improved here. Crafting is largely identical with a few returning and new items like mines that act less like grenades as well as a homemade suppressor for pistons, and thankfully for half the game you won’t have to deal with crafting shivs which drove me nuts in Part I. Weapon upgrades are much more streamlined now, with only four upgrades being available for each weapon and the whole “tool kit” leveling thing being dropped entirely. These upgrades are a lot more meaningful than just the various stat upgrades in the first game, and smartly are now visually represented on the weapon. Instead of just having a few different levels of faster reloads, guns will have extended magazines or percentage changes to damage or stability. The character upgrades meanwhile are also more significant, as these are now a series of perks rather than stat increases. Rather than gradually decreasing weapon sway or increasing listening mode distance, character upgrades will now allow you to unlock various abilities, whether that’s bonuses to certain actions, new crafting recipes, improvements to item effectiveness. These perk trees are locked behind skill books that you uncover over the course of the game, and by the end of my playthrough I’d basically unlocked anything that looked useful, but it’s a smart way to make me covet all of those pills that you find in the various bathrooms and desk drawers of Seattle a lot more, as the upgrades they lead to are much more impactful than the opake stat changes of the first game.
One area where the design felt lacking was in how insanely, on rails linear this experience was. Obviously the first game was very linear, but a key difference between these two games as I will expand more on later is that whereas the first game is an incredibly tight and focused experience, this game feels overstuffed and yet meandering, poorly paced and far far too long to be able to support design like this. My most recent playthrough of the first game clocked in at a little under eight hours, and this was nearly three times as long as that, and the inability to branch out or break away from the plot did not do the game any favors. You’re basically pushed forward down one path the entire game, but with one key exception that made the rest of the design feel all the more frustrating. In the opening section in Seattle, Dina and Ellie explore several areas as they look for Abby’s militia group. While not actually an open world environment, this sequence felt much more open and at least gave an effective illusion of nonlinearity that the rest of the game sorely missed. While playing through this section, I became hopeful that this represented the rest of the game, that this was Naughty Dog evolving its game design template after having tinkered with this sort of design structure in Uncharted: Lost Legacy, and I thought them committing to something like this for their next major release would be a great evolution for the studio. Sadly, that promise was never realized, as soon as that first day in Seattle was over the game nailed itself back to the same linear structure that, for better and for worse, Naughty Dog has defined itself with since the first Uncharted. I like Uncharted a lot, and they share this same sort of linearity, but those games are a decade old at this point, it feels like change in structure is needed here, especially after dangling that change in front of me in the first few hours.
Visually though the game is incredible. Much like with the first game, environments are incredibly detailed and thought out, and they’re a treat to explore as you pick your way through the scavenged ruins of a dead society. Seattle, where the vast majority of the game takes place, feels like a ruin collapsing in on itself even as people try to eek out lives in that ruin. As someone who’s been to Seattle a few times, exploring this overgrown version of the city was great, and I found myself getting extremely nostalgic for cold, rainy days in the Pacific Northwest. Obviously it doesn’t fit an identical, one to one layout of the city but there were still areas that visually felt familiar, even as the game avoids most of the more well known Seattle institutions like Pike Place Market. There’s no level in the Space Needle, thank God. And yet the game’s facsimile of the boardwalk feels like the boardwalk, so even if it’s not exact and it avoids most of the obvious choices it still feels authentic and accurate. On top of this the game looks great from a technical standpoint, as environments and character models look incredibly detailed and realistic. There’s also some excellent lighting effects here, and all of it comes together to form one of the better visual experiences of this generation, and a massive step up on the first game. All this while the game manages to run at a pretty consistent thirty frames per second on a launch model PS4, and I honestly can’t remember any significant technical problems along the way save for a couple instances of items failing to despawn from a character’s hands, which could be mildly amusing but if that’s the worst it ever got, that’s saying something.
As I think about things, the actual “game” part of Part II is absolutely fantastic, the various design teams really did an incredible job here. So why don’t I like this? Is the narrative really that muddled and frustrating? Sadly I think the answer to that is yes, but it’s not as if it’s completely without merit. For one I think the choice of Ellie as a protagonist is really inspired. I know a lot of people were furious at the decision to kill Joel but at no point was that ever an issue to me, and if it led to a game where Elie is now the lead that made perfect sense, and gave a really clear revenge motivation for Ellie. Part of Ellie’s journey in the first game was here growing into the sort of character who could hold her own in the apocalypse, so thrusting her completely into the spotlight seems like the obvious and correct move to me. Further, there are flashback moments between Ellie and Joel that can be both incredibly emotionally satisfying and also gut wrenching. A clear standout that I’ve seen people really latched onto was the museum sequence, in which Joel takes Ellie to a ruined science museum on her birthday. That moment really was when the game delivered on what I wanted at the end of the first game, and if you want to experience the best that this game can be from a writing standpoint, it’s in that sequence. Further, not just Ellie and Joel but everyone is really well acted, I don’t think there’s a single performance that I’d describe as weak, save for maybe the game’s bizarre inclusion of special guest star Jeffery Wright. I mean, I love Jeffery Wright, he’ll always be my Felix Leiter and I can’t wait to see him as Commissioner Gordon, but… why? His character is barely in this game, usually only talked about rather than shown, so casting an actor like that seemed distracting to me.
So yeah, there is good stuff here. It’s not the worst game ever made like some people have been screaming online, it’s not this horrific insult to the first game or to the medium, because a lot of it is super well executed. So why didn’t it click with me? Well it all comes down to the writing, to the story and characters and themes, and all of it comes together to end up just a really unsatisfying experience that drags on for so long that any positives end up buried underneath a mountain of questionable decisions elsewhere. And all of that starts with tone.
When this game first came out, one common complaint I saw online was that the game just wasn’t fun. Whenever I saw that all I could do was roll my eyes, but having played through this game now I clearly have egg on my face because holy shit, this game is so goddamn miserable. To say that this game isn’t fun is underselling it, this thing feels like an arduous, twenty plus hour death march that I actively struggled to play even as so many of its aspects were well done. It’s just so miserable, so devoid of life and humor and enjoyment outside of a few specific moments. Misery was the order of the day, and it permeates almost every part of this experience, snuffing out any feeling of hopefulness that the first game may have left behind in favor of being the dark second chapter of a story that wasn’t exactly all sunshine and rainbows to begin with.
I think what sets these two games apart in terms of tone is the difference between melancholy and misery. To me, the first game was incredibly melancholy, it was a game where the world characters knew had died and constantly they had to look back with sadness at what they lost while still struggling to push forward. There were still bits of nostalgia, mournful of things that were lost and wishing them back even through that could never happen, whether it was Joel reminiscing about his daughter or him and Ellie wandering through what was left of a record store or a restaurant. Part II meanwhile was just constantly awful, hammering home how everything is bad, everyone is a monster, and in the end everything that could have possibly gone to shit goes to shit. It’s just so tiresome, and it wore me down and made me just resent having to keep playing it.
There was just nothing for me to hold onto. In the first game Ellie was kind of brilliantly written if only because she oftentimes would force the tone of the game and the nature of the story and conversations back to either something more hopeful or lighter. Here she’s a far darker character, which given what happens to her in this story and between the events of the first and second games makes sense, she’s an older and changed person now. But even if that change makes logical sense, it means that we’ve lost our anchor point, the character that forced a bit of hope into the world last time out is the one most eagerly drowning out anything that could balance the experience into feeling less like a miserable death march.
I get that media and art isn’t always supposed to be fun, I’m not a four year old, I understand the purpose of films or games that feel like this. But usually those bits of media usually have more meaningful things to say. Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List are miserable films, between them Spielberg basically laid out all of the misery and darkness of the Second World War, but both those films not only contained more artistry than this but they also deal with deeper, more complicated themes. There’s much more to them than their misery. I don’t know if I can really say that about TLOU2, and as a result I spent large swaths or this game just wanting to play something else. There’s a bit in this game where a character plays Hotline Miami, and another when there’s a PS3 set up in a safe house with Uncharted 2 next to it. These moments were supposed to be cute little nods to these games but to me they’re just frustrating! All it did was remind me that I would’ve much rather been playing Hotline Miami than this! Hotline Miami is fun, it’s colorful, it’s exciting, it’s challenging in a compelling way, I remember its soundtrack, it’s much more in line with how I want to spend my free time than this slow walking nightmare game. Honestly that misery is why it took me more than three weeks to finish this, so many times I’d play for a bit only to put the game down because I just would rather spend my time on something else. Who the hell wants to play a miserable game like this when Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2 exists?
That tonal problem really becomes unbearable as this game dragged on and on. I’ve played a lot of very long games over the years. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, I sank nearly a hundred and thirty into Metal Gear Solid V before I finally saw credits, and I played so much Red Dead Redemption II that I felt like I never wanted to see anything related to horses or cowboys again for as long as I lived, but none of those games felt as aggressively, teeth grindingly long as TLOU2 did. For hours and hours this dragged on, telling a tangentially related story from the antagonist’s point of view even as its main plot felt close to wrapping up, basically starting over as we should’ve been about to hit the resolution. Essentially the game completely fucking derailed its story in order to tell one that the game’s writers apparently also had cooking in some doomed attempt at thematic parallel. It’s actually something to behold when I can grow this exhausted with a game, thinking of the ludicrous, tedious tasks I’ve gladly completed in games only for this ten hour jaunt to come along and about ruin my day more than once, so exhausting that it took me way more sessions to complete than it should have.
About halfway through the game, after three days in which Ellie has carved a bloody path across Seattle, pseudo-antagonist Abby arrives and confronts her, and we cut to the end of the first game but from Abby’s perspective, and then in turn to the beginning of the three day Seattle period. The notion of having to witness all those days again but just from a different perspective made me, in the moment, shut my console off and go play something else because I was so annoyed by that idea, I didn’t want to have my face rubbed in everything I’d done at the game’s behest while playing as Ellie. But I came back, and was rewarded with a completely new story that felt like it could have just been the basis for a new game, and honestly I think that’s worse. You’re essentially starting from scratch, with new weapons you need to upgrade and new abilities you have to unlock and on and on this thing sprawls as a whole new cast of characters are paraded across the screen and it was just exhausting. We get nested flashbacks within flashbacks as we flesh out a character who never approach anything resembling likable or interesting, and their attempts at parallel between Abby and Joel end up just making everything feel overly familiar and repetitive before the game mercifully gets back to its actual story for an hour before it wraps up. If you want an idea of what this structure is like, imagine watching The Empire Strikes back, but when Luke confronts Darth Vader we have to cut back and watch The Revenge Of The Sith in its entirety before we see Luke’s escape. I mean sure, maybe there would be something thematic there that works but pacing wise that’s a nightmare, and this game is about five times as long as that experience would be.
It didn’t need to be this bad, this overly long. The main gist of the Abby portion comes in two components. One it’s to show the player that, from Abby’s perspective, she’s getting justice and that Joel was a monster, and that the group of people Ellie set out to brutally murder had families, hopes, personalities. They’re not a faceless group of murderers, they were people too. The other I’m sure was that it would make you question your actions as Ellie, and make you regret some of the actions you took while hammering home some of the game’s main themes about revenge and the cycle of violence. The problem with that, however, is that those story objectives could be achieved in probably a third of the time this game takes if not less, and as a result there are so many plot threads here that are just needless and don’t matter. Why should I give a shit about Abby and Owen’s romance/love triangle? Because it being a mess shows revenge is bad? What? Whose narrative is this, Abby’s or Ellie’s? I guess I’m a moron for expecting the game to be about the girl on the fucking cover! Was that sequence where Abby has to rescue Lev from the island really essential? How does that impact Ellie’s journey meaningfully? There’s just so much fat here that could have been cut it’s just egregious, and makes the overall experience far worse than it might have been. You didn’t need ten hours and nested flashbacks within flashbacks to get your point across here, so much of this could’ve been left on the cutting room floor and that only would have resulted in a better game. It’s honestly at the point where I’m trying to salvage the structure of this in my head. Maybe Abby’s section should’ve been the entire game? Maybe you don’t even have it connected to the first game? Just new characters in this world? At a minimum, having Abby’s section be concurrent with Ellie’s and you hop back and forth would have made the pacing less agonizing at about the fifteen hour mark.
The Abby section is just a failure from a story perspective. If the hope was to make me sympathize with Abby’s perspective on events and thus make me think long and hard about Joel and his actions or make me care about her in a way that made her fights with Ellie difficult because, like when Batman and Superman fight for some contrived reason, I just want both to win and be okay, well then they failed disastrously. The writers on this game buried Abby for me as a character when she killed the character I actually wanted to see in this sequel, and they kept digging her hole deeper as they wasted my time chasing after weird culturists for a narrative that wasn’t satisfying on its own and within the context of the larger game felt even more pointless. Honestly, now that the dust has settled on this whole thing, I’m kinda glad I killed Abby’s dad in the first game and all her friends in the second because of how much she wasted my fucking time. As I played through her portion of the game, I never thought “oh, this changes and challenges my perspective on these characters and makes me reconsider my actions”, instead all I was thinking was how badly I’ve been wanting to replay Death Stranding lately. At least that game is relaxing! Never did I reconsider what Ellie or Joel had done and how maybe from Abby’s perspective they’re the bad guys. I already knew that would be the case, I’m not a fifth grader, and by the end of the game I just didn’t care anymore.
What makes the bloated, overlong state of this game even more egregious is the questionable themes presented in this game. So much of this game is based around this idea that Abby and Ellie seeking revenge ruined their respective lives, and if they’d simply let things go they would have simply been better off. Okay, I’ll bite. Sure, in a real life context this sort of thing matters. Breaking the cycle of violence is an important part of real world reconciliation and the peace process. The situation in Northern Ireland is an example of that very fact. But I think the writers of this game probably should have seen this backlash coming, because going through a revenge story for hours and hours only for the game to say “Actually, revenge is bad and you are a fool for wanting it here” feels kind of condescending. You can’t really argue that revenge is bad and the cycle of violence needs to end when the best part of your game is exacting brutal revenge and committing unspeakable violence against people who simply get in your way, and you especially shouldn’t turn around and say that the game was itself about how the violence you commited is bad. It’s like a war game going on and on about how war is hell while also having incredibly violent and satisfying shooting. There’s a disconnect there that undoes any thematic message the writers were trying to convey.
This narrative was never going to be satisfying to me, I get that now. I’ll say one last spoiler warning here, but at the end of the game Ellie allows Abby to escape instead of drowning her as some final show of humanity, which is so fucking eye rolling it’s hard to process. All of this was basically pointless! Is that what you’re trying to say, Naughty Dog? That revenge is pointless? Okay, okay, sure, but by taking that route you’ve crafted a narrative that just sputters out while wagging its finger at the player. I’m imagining a version of John Wick, where after he’s committed a one man war crime against the mob he gets to the guy who killed his dog and instead of doing the thing the audience wants, he puts his gun away, because the cycle of violence needs to end dammit! Does that have a point thematically and philosophically? You bet! Would that have been a shitty way to end that movie? Indisputably.
In regards to that “wagging its finger” bit, recently I listened to a podcast with the game’s writer and director Neil Druckmann, in which he responded to some of the criticisms of the game’s narrative. At one point, Druckmann pushes back on that idea, claiming that the game wasn’t lecturing the player at all on its violence and whether one character was worse or not, that the game was just presenting events. I mean, that’s absolute horse shit, but even if it wasn’t, does he not see what a poor defense of this game that is? You can’t just present violence in a game like this and then say you’re not really saying anything about the characters performing said violence. This isn’t a news article, this isn’t an objective piece of journalism or work of a historian. This is a narrative written by creatives in a piece of consumable media, you’re communicating ideas when you include violence and murder in a world that you created, and to say that you’re not trying to pass judgment on these characters and tell the audience something about them but have a larger message besides them is just ludicrous, because I know you are indeed doing just that and saying something about these characters because I played the fucking game. I lowkey hate this, when a creator kind of just throws his hands up and says “oh I can’t tell you what interpretation to have” it’s just so frustrating to me. It always feels like a cop out, it feels like they’re not willing to stick to their guns and admit the story says what it says.
I don’t know, you can justify creative choices until you’re red in the face but if they just don’t click with me I don’t know what else I can say. All game the story is hammering home these parallels of how from different perspectives different people are the good or bad guys or the real monsters or what have you, and honestly it feels so basic an observation. Simply saying “ooooh there’s violence on both sides and from Abby’s perspective what she did was justified and how that should make you think about whether what Ellie does is bad!” isn’t going to blow any minds. I don’t know, if just feels like the game is dangling this in front of me like a set of keys, that I was too stupid to get this sort of thing out of the last game. Of course I got that dynamic last time around! It’s one of the things I praised about it! Part II feels like it’s almost sophomoric in this regard, its themes and thematic structure are nowhere near as impressive as it appears to think they are. Just having thematic elements and having parallels exist within a narrative doesn’t mean that narrative is suddenly now special or novel or good. If your carefully thought out structure and themes are in service of a story that doesn’t end in a compelling way while in service of miserable, unlikable characters then that’s just not going to matter.
At the end of the day though what really, really drives me up a wall about how needlessly bloated and long this game ended up being is the allegations that developer Naughty Dog put its workers through grueling, horrific crunch to get this game made. This article lays out some of the conditions that works went though while working on this game, and in case it isn’t clear working twelve hour days and weekends is not acceptable at any company, let alone one that makes fucking video games. The fucking gall of Neil Druckmann to get on a podcast and say that the game was about finding hope and saving a character’s humanity when he had people working until 11 PM at night every day for months on end blows my mind. Developers allegedly were hospitalized they worked such long hours, and for what? So that we could have another flashback fleshing out Owen and Abby’s relationship? Fuck Owen, Owen sucks! He’s awful and the idea that someone didn’t get to see their spouse or kid on a given night so they could work late on the lighting on Owen’s dopey white guy face makes me furious. Maybe you wouldn’t need to work your developers so hard they fucking quit if your game wasn’t ten hours too long, Neil!
Some might reply by saying that this is just a fact of the game industry, every game I’ve ever written about had developers crunch at some point in order to get it out the door. Okay, sure, that’s true, but to my recollection those games didn’t come from studios that have reputations in the industry as “that studio where you get crunched half to death”, plus even if those devs did crunch, they deserve to be criticized for that too! In this case it just felt more egregious because so many of my problems with this game stem from it being way too fucking long. The thing I’m going to remember about this game until the day I die isn’t Abby’s journey, it won’t be Joel’s gruesome death, it won’t even be the museum scene I loved so much. It’ll be the fact that this game was twice as long as it needed to be and a company basically wrecked people’s health, morale, and work life balance to make it happen and that fucking sucks.
So that’s where I’m at with it. The Last Of Us Part II is a game that has absolutely fantastic elements while using them to tell a story that just doesn’t hit when it needs to while far overstaying its welcome. It’s thematically muddled and was the result of absolutely insane overworking by its creators and as an overall experience just left me feeling miserable and tired, wanting to just go play or do almost anything else just after the halfway point. For hours I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game was just wasting my time, and that I’d be in a better mood if I just went for a walk or read a book or took a nap instead of forcing myself through it. When I finished The Last Of Us Part II and returned to the main menu, a notification popped up letting me know that I could now replay the game in New Game Plus mode, and that honesty got a chuckle out of me. Why anyone would subject themselves to this arduous journey a second time is beyond me, I’ve already spent too much time away from games I actually like because of The Last Of Us Part II, and I’m not making that mistake twice.
PS: Want to hear Druckmann and company address some criticisms of this game? Here is the podcast I listened to, decide for yourself if I’m overreacting or misunderstanding them.
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