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They pile on on critics—justifiably—but TLOU P2 showed that gamers weren't ready for literature that pushes their beliefs.
PT 2 DISCUSSIONView all comments
Generic? TLoU2 crosses the boundary from pure entertainment into art by inviting investigation into the human condition itself. That distinction is what transforms good media into brilliant, and is already rare enough in more widespread genres like film and books, let alone video games. What other game other than its predecessor sits with you like TLoU2 does? What other game causes you to consider your own human experience and recontextualises the world around you? GoW, RDR2 and other good story driven games fail to surpass that final barrier into true art. How can you ever call TLoU2 generic?
I call it generic because it is generic. I respect your opinion, but as a fan of story driven games it is incredibly difficult for me to ignore TLOU2's narrative blunders. This game's story is about as nuanced and fleshed out as a C tier TV show.
Characters come and go without giving them proper time to develop, the pacing is all over the place, over relying on flashbacks in already messy plotline, dialog that is more boring than watching paint dry, and worst of all, by the end i felt like nothing that happened in the course of the story amounted to anything. It's honestly spectacular how the same people that made the first game and the uncharted series thought this was a good story. The game has somewhat of a strong opening but after the few first hours I was constantly hoping that the next level would be the last. It was such a painful experience.
A game like ghost of tsushima does a much better job at telling the type of story that TLOU2's pretends to tell. Revenge in ghost of tsushima is done justice, how it changes people and how it impacts the world around them. The morality of revenge is also better explored, better defined and better justified.
Similarly, God of war 2018 and its sequel do a fantastic job of telling a post revenge story, which isn't directly the same as TLOU2's, but illustrates how the same elements of storytelling could have been utilized in it.
Judgment is also a better example of a game that handles characters with clashing motives and goals. Unlike TLOU2, Judgment doesn't require a 42 page long essay for you to justify why the antagonist is doing what they're doing.
Of course, i am not saying that TLOU2 should be more like those games, i am illustrating how i fail to see the game's story as "Brave", "Compelling" or "Mature" as I hear people calling it, when there are games doing a much better job than it at doing the same things.
TLOU2's story isn't brave; it's cliché, predictable and painfully average. Its story is a "Turn your brain off and enjoy it" type of deal.
The game is brave and mature because it kills its iconic, beloved main character in a pathetic, unheroic way within an hour, it asks you to empathize with his murderer, and then makes you watch the other beloved main character destroy her own life. (And it gambles 200 million dollars on that narrative). That clearly didn't work for you, but you are disingenuous calling that generic and cliché. What other game does that. Certainly none of the ones you mentioned, they are largely save power fantasies.
That's not brave, though. Coming to this game, everyone pretty much knew Joel is kicking the bucket. From the first trailer the main point of discussion was if Joel is dying. And let's not pretend that killing him was some risky move, because it's very clear that ellie was the more popular character anyways. It's not like the last of us 2 having a different protagonist will ultimately mean nobody is playing it.
And let me be clear by saying that I have nothing against killing off Joel! I thought it was a cool scene too, but just like you mentioned, it was all in the opening to the game, which is 20 hours long. What do the following 19 hours provide plot wise? Literally almost nothing!
It's a long witch hunt which is segmented between two povs that service the plot in no way. And whatever progress the story is having is always halted by yet another flashback segment. It's as if the devs have written themselves into a corner by killing Joel too early, and didn't know what to do next.
And who did they replace Joel with? A bunch of characters the game begs you to care about yet provide less than the bare minimum for them to even matter. And when you DO start caring, they either lose plot relevance or are killed off. Like, don't get me wrong, Joel wasn't a perfect character, and often suffered from very common video game male protagonist tropes, but at least the writing was good enough for me to care.
Even tho Joel was, in retrospect, not so different from the people he fights and kills throughout TLOU, the game made me care because the story was made in such a way that Joel and Ellie's actions have real emotional impact not only on them, but also on me. That power is all but gone in TLOU2. Nothing means anything anymore. When someone dies I'm not shocked or saddened, I'm almost always like "Oh no. Anyways...."
The last of us 2 is a remarkable case of how you can provide a 20 hour long experience while at the same barely having any substance within those 20 hours.
This game's plot is so lost between what it's trying to say and what it's actually saying, that it ends up saying nothing at all.
I cared about Joel, i cared about Ellie, but In the sequel i don't even know if the game itself cares.
Now I completely understand if you think everything i just said was a big fat pile of bull shit, because at the end of the day, art is subjective and we all have different opinions on what makes art good or bad, but I hope that it was clear why, in my opinion, TLOU2's story is painfully mediocre at its best and tragically awful at its worst.
I think NakeyJakey made a fantastic video about this game a few years ago and much of what he says aligns with my opinion. Even if you like TLOU2 i encourage you to watch this because it perfectly illustrates why i and many others were left frustrated by this game.