Starting with the most important thing about this game. Naughty Dog has had people discuss their culture of crunch, burnout, overly inflated budgets, poor treatment of certain employees, etc for some time now. This game could be the greatest game ever made and still no product would be worth contributing to such a damaging culture. Even their own developers whining about how honored and happy they are to launch the game and that people talking about crunch are only doing it to deflect their hatred of other things that happen in the game is doing a massive disservice to everyone else in the industry, as is anyone professionally reviewing the game who makes no mention of the studio culture or excuses it because they love the game so much. Normally I wouldn't even play or buy anything made by a developer reported on like Naughty Dog, but I got it as part of my month long $1 Gamefly membership.

The second most important thing about the game is that they have done excellent work when it comes to accessibility options. They have included a large number of options to help people with issues with sight, hearing, other physical motions, etc. When the game first launches it not only asks if you want subtitles but if you want text narrated. You can add a meter to subtitles that will show an arrow pointing the direction towards the person speaking, which is just a great future for anyone to have if you don't have surround sound. One of the first games where the jackass following you yells, "Hey, over here," and I don't have to shrug and wonder how the hell that was supposed to help me find them. Aiming can be automated, stealth can be made almost automated. I can't really give good details of the use of all of the options, as I didn't personally test things and am not the target for a lot of it, but there are a number of written and video reviews talking about and praising them in much more detail as the focus of their reviews. Anything normalizing and advancing accessibility options in games is more important than almost anything the game will individually do with its gameplay and story.

I never liked The Last of Us, I found nothing interesting about the characters, a grieving standoffish father figure growing attached to a smart ass kid again or about the setting as I had long looked beyond the Mad Maxs and Fallout 3s of post apocalyptic stories to discover that the end of the world as we know it doesn't always happen in a barren desert. I looked at it as a technical achievement, one few would ever hope to reach without the massive budget and time given to Naught Dog, and nothing more. If it was a movie it would have been one of those mediocre affairs where you hope that the good actors in it can get attached to a better script, comparing it to books of the genre would have been laughable. The gameplay barely worth remembering. If there was one positive I had hearing about the sequel, it was that we would likely be playing as Ellie the entire or most of the time, the moment where I thought the former game was at its best, and being able to tighten up some of the weaker gameplay elements.

We reach an early point of the game that becomes the catalyst of the plot, Joel being killed. Killed by someone, Abby, wanting revenge for her father that Joel killed at the end of the last game, though likely also a little upset about the whole dooming the world and dismantling her entire group and family thing. Making Abby very similar to Joel in their willingness to kill the people that would take away their loved ones away and putting her in the same kind of place that Joel would likely have been in had Ellie died at the end of the last game, had he been unable to selfishly deny Ellie her own agency before starting a massacre. The focus of the game will even shift to Abby's perspective eventually as she becomes the other playable main character for nearly half the game. Abby is stronger and slower than Ellie, we are essentially playing as Joel, both mechanically and in many ways personality wise. Even being joined by a kid that she becomes attached to and protective of at the expense of those she was formerly working with, just as Joel did, and playing as someone too stupid to pick up an actual knife at some point forcing them to rely on the crafting of shivs. Which does give an interesting idea for a premise, Ellie becoming more like Joel to track down and kill someone for killing him, with Abby herself doing the same kind of thing which we know that Joel likely would have done if he had been in Abby's shoes, if though much more justified. With Abby also learning to let go of her anger and open up more over time from her new companions. But video games and movies, especially large budget and action focused ones, are rarely capable of thinking about any of the people in between. When we reach the inevitable confrontation at the end would trying to pretend that Ellie is justified in hunting someone down or letting go of her desire for revenge even make sense or matter when you have only reached this point over the bodies of 100s of others. Others whom the game may have named to try to make their deaths more impactful during combat, but that don't really matter at the end of the day.

His death has lead to an abundance of review bombed tantrums from petulant cry babies solely or almost solely based on the loss of such a generic character, raged about by people who clearly don't experience enough well written media, while also being desperate to make all media worse in general with the belief that directors and writers should care about the screaming of entitled nobodies. None of them even able to understand the basic premise that Joel is the villain in the first game, because why wouldn't a mass murderer that dooms the world to deny a woman any agency not be seen as a hero to these people? All while repeating the favored puerile whaling of their most media illiterate and idolized Youtube critics, "I deserved more, because your characters belong to me" and the lowest form of criticism, "Plot hole, plot hole, plot hole." There is no world, characters, themes, framing, mechanics, or anything more to a piece of media than they killed some guy barely worth remembering from seven years ago, so they can have a breakdown and give it a 0 on metacritic. What all sane people do, hit the metacritic or rotten tomato user score, a thing that no one in real world looks at or cares about once you leave the corners of Reddit and a Youtube comment section, and when you look at the massive sales numbers. Pointless outrage to do nothing more than make the internet dumber. Much of the language used around the outrage of the game can easily be inferred as, "if you had just killed that gay Jew like your first trailer made it look, kept away this unconventionally by media standards attractive playable character, and gave me the gruff Daddy that I am entitled to, it could have been great." A rage stoked by no shortage of Youtubers that even a passing glance at their content is almost always very concerned about western civilization, women doing things in media, and somehow still posting videos about The Last Jedi only days ago because both products have the same basic combined tantrum of, "This old man should have been the main character, and if he is going to die then he should have died better." Better usually meaning while killing 100s or 1000s of people, not by simply having your past catch up to you. Abby's revenge on the villain of the series means she should die, while Ellie's much less necessary and more violent revenge that lies to and endangers her friends and loved ones is awesome. The people that will love Joel and Ellie and hate Abby would mostly be made up of the same people who would watch Starship Troopers or Full Metal Jacket and sign up for the military because of how much fun it all looked or who would idolize a character like Rorschach.

An overall story that dismantles the notion of Ellie being a good or just person and the younger generation continuing the violence of the older. One that mechanically tries to make the majority of killing so much fun in the bloody but meaningful consequence free way that games like to handle violence. The vast majority of it being un-examined and the sheer body count making anything characters would learn laughable in the long run. Ellie will be asked what she plans to do when she finds one member of the group who was present at Joel's death but not the direct cause of it, asking a question after we just killed 30 people to get to her that we didn't know at all is a bid ridiculous. It is only the start of the game and we've slit too many throats and threw too many molotov cocktails for this kind of thinking and hesitation to even make sense. Enemies will scream on the ground while dying, yell the names of their dead friends, and dogs will whine over the bodies of their owners but we kill so many people and so much of the mechanics are fun and repeated that it would be closer to parody than anything meaningful.

In a game whose best moments typically come from the more lighthearted moments and character interaction it is usually focused on misery even in areas not even necessary to be related to the plot, or that just seem ridiculous. Ellie is spit on for being a lesbian and we get more some abuse aimed at a transgender character, both being really unnecessary and will likely make people who have gone through similar things really uncomfortable. The moment that Abby realizes the boy she is with is transgender being when some of the people you are fighting call out his former name, why only these people use that name or why they would even be aware of his new name like some other people you fight, and why they would use either name when 99% of them just call him and his sister apostates....¯\(ツ)/¯. There is an amusing in it's ridiculousness moment where during a large more set piece area where the two enemy factions are basically in open warfare as a town burns around them will specifically call out the characters of Abby and Lev to kill them if you are spotted as if every single member of these factions know what these two look like. Though the factions themselves are basically generic ridiculous organizations one being a massive military organization of 1000s of people that sometimes just executes people for fun and seems to all pledge loyalty and be fully run by one guy with the other being a cult of weirdos whose elders have somehow apparently completely reversed the teachings of their former dead leader in a span of only a couple years and with traditions somehow treated as if the world didn't only end up in its situation around 20 years ago. Ellie will torture and kill certain people and become visibly bothered by it unlike the 100 other people and dogs we've now killed. The game might assign names to all of your enemies but the only names that carry any weight are the the main ones we look for as part of the plot.

When the game starts and Ellie begins her quest for revenge we assume it is because she isn't fully aware how deserved Joel's death was (even before his actions in the previous game). But as we go on we eventually see through flashbacks that she does know the extent of what Joel did which makes the sudden, and often quickly ignored, moments of guilt she feels even more out of place then when just paired with all the people she kills and feels nothing for. The story never even touching on Ellie tricking her friends into going on this killing spree along with her and Tommy. The most positive thing I can say about the main revenge focus of the story is that it shows that, no matter what final choice would have been made by the character, that there would no going back to normalcy, but there was really only one played out way that the majority of this story could follow and there are no surprises other than the one that makes Ellie even more unlikable.

Odd discourse started over this game as well as Spec Ops the Line trying to make you personally complicit and guilty for the violent actions of your character. I never got where this came from as it never framed Ellie's actions as anything more than her own, there was no ridiculous statements of shutting the game off to win like there was with Spec Ops the Line. Though I believe Spec Ops to be much more interesting than this as it comes from a slightly different era of games development and writing, criticizes the entire military shooter genre and how people react to it, as well as US military and military game propaganda and support of war crimes all while having the main character slowly losing his mind. In general I've found many other games have better handled the very bleak and violent setting, death, revenge, and similar themes to what The Last of Us 2 tries to better than it did (Spec Ops, Undertale, LISA, Pathologic, LUCAH: Born of a Dream, etc).

A major issue I have is that the game starts to overstay its welcome, being too long at around 25 hours. In that time we are introducing so many things that aren't needed and leaving little time or such sporadic moments that are actually positive contribution. The pacing issues that come with many AAA games, it taking so long to show or represent something that a lower budget product can typically manage with little more than a single line of dialogue or brief view. There is so much busy work in traversing and scavenging, so many frequent interruptions. The fairly generic AAA action combat and stealth mechanics can often get old in the more stereotypical styled encounters. The strange scarcity of ammo and supplies hurts combat if you want a more aggressive approach as enemies with full quivers of arrows and military squads will for some reason drop no or one or two bullets. Changing characters to Abby resets your weapon and skill upgrade progress, meaning more running around looking for things to scavenge when we might have gotten to a point with Ellie where that time sink was less needed.

The environments are detailed and impressive and with that positive comes the tedious and overused bits you see in games like this. Slowly traversing through an area for no other reason than the game wants you to marvel at it, finding pointless collectibles like cards and coins, we have the ride or walk on a hill that reveals the city in the distance, and the minor puzzles of finding ways to hold doors and gates open because god forbid you just climb over that car with the overgrown vines on it or break through a flimsy wall or garage door. Even when it looks like we have reached the point when the game would normally end we instead get a few more chapters and an unneeded third enemy faction to tack on a bit more time and misery and torture before the end.

We see the details that likely come from the combination of crunch, massive budget, and doubled development time of just about any other normal game project in the way that other developers have looked at the detail and realistic movements in the ropes this game uses in a mixture of awe and horror, partially at the thought of ever being required to take the time and resources to do something like that themselves. The ropes that almost no one except for those same developers will even think or care about. The effort is often in things likely to be overlooked or not consciously noticed. The abundant details frequently found in the environments of the rooms you search posters, figures, cups, vases, paintings all in a variety of styles and often covering the desks and shelves. They do have some of the best in game facial expressions thanks to a system they created that ties lines into certain emotions that the models have expressions for, better highlighting the situation they find themselves in outside of the actor captured cutscenes, with the actual cutscenes having some of most emotive characters and acting I've seen since Mafia 3.

Ellie and Dina are a great couple, I would much rather have Dina around than Joel. She is nearly every bit Ellie and Joel's equal in survival knowledge and combat, added technical knowledge, a past that when spoken of can show elements of as much if not more danger than Ellie's life for her and her family, she talks about her Jewish heritage, and shows her strong desire to support Ellie while having her own clear doubts. When they are together I almost forget how much I hate Ellie. The game is much worse anytime she isn't around in Ellie's sections, which is most of the time. As far as Abby is concerned, if the first The Last of Us had starred her and her companion Lev, I might very well have liked it, and I was disappointed to start playing as Ellie again when the time came (though I also wanted the game to be over at that point).

Blows and wounds in combat are made to feel weighty and painful for the person who received them. The two factions that you are primarily facing have some differences in equipment and enemy types and speak to each other in different ways, with one faction frequently using whistles to call out danger or to check in, though they do basically handle the situations they are in in the same ways. After playing the first game it is very nice to have a knife that keeps working while playing as Ellie. You have much more active companions when fights start, who can aid you with stealth kills, point out enemies, kill and distract during combat, and find the way forward while exploring. Though they can physically get in your way during stealth and combat. A focus on stealth can lead to some fairly intense encounters when large groups of enemies are sweeping through an area and you have to make use of laying down in a stretch of short grass to conceal yourself. In some areas you can create noise to learn infected enemies to attack human enemies, this even gets used against you at one point. Encounter areas are often fairly large and give you a variety of ways to approach them and there are some good set piece moments. There's no more ridiculous scenes of putting makeshifts platforms and rafts over water, even showing a memory with Joel with them making fun of the pallet rafts of the last game. The option to not only replay chapters but encounters in those chapters is nice to see, as I certainly would have had more fun with combat if I wasn't bothering to conserve supplies due to the small number of crafting supplies and ammunition you are allowed to carry combined with the strange crafting system that won't let you craft two or three things to fill your inventory if it would put you one over your carry limit.

At the end I found the game to have a few strong character moments, mostly related to Dina and interactions between Abby and Lev, great acting and facial capture, a more tense though not always as mechanically interesting stealth system when compared to many other games, and some wonderfully detailed environments. With a story that just isn't that interesting to me, some questionable character and world choices, too long a playtime, and too many overdone generic AAA game elements to keep me interested mechanically. Would I want to support what sounds like a poor company, one that employees and is run by a lot of people who have been having tantrums when they see criticism directed at their game, all just to get about four great hours of gameplay mixed with about 20 hours of AAA mediocrity and bleakness? Probably not, but those were damn good ropes.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1277080351836237826