Not only that, but they let you have the classic video game power fantasies in excellent encounter design. Why have this horrible, violent, senseless slasher fight if, at its conclusion, Ellie simply let’s Abby go again? But once again we have another group of wicked bastards to contend with. I loved Abby. The former is a group of former rebels who shook off the yoke of a tyrannical post-apocalyptic government and set up their own quasi-fascistic organization. I mean, really? We learn quickly where Ellie and Joel currently stand in their relationship. It’s a great location, all sun and heat compared to Seattle’s rain and gloom; orange and yellow instead of green and grey. There were some very bad people in the original Last Of Us, but I never rolled my eyes the way I did with the Scars. Story and characters are well done as expected and the game plays and feels amazing. And that belies the game’s central cynicism: it makes the violence central and unavoidable and generally fun. Because he couldn’t stand to lose his daughter. While some of her story is interesting, she really isn’t. I didn’t get a review copy so I was late to actually playing it, but even after I finished the game I had a hard time putting pen to paper. I’m going to publish it now, come hell or high water. And any doctor worth a damn would never harbor such intentions, no matter how many zebras they save from barbed wire. The Highs, Lows, and Whoas of the 2021 ACM Awards. Again. One might wonder at this point, why you’d really even have to separate the two. And they go their separate ways, not friends or allies, but united in suffering and tragedy. The sequence starts with Abby and her companion Lev searching for the Fireflies in Santa Barbara. It masquerades at depth and meaning but fails to deliver either. In keeping with the spirit of the first game, The Last of Us Part II has become one of the best games of this generation. Halfway through the game, you go back in time to when Ellie and Dina arrive in the city, but you play the next few days as Abby instead, seeing things through her eyes. But instead, Ellie cuts her down. He sets out first and Ellie sets out a bit later, accompanied by her new girlfriend, Dina. Not great, not terrible. She must have left behind two hundred corpses in Seattle, including all of Abby’s friends, but that’s not enough to sate her thirst for comeuppance, and she doesn’t realize, bafflingly, that it will never be enough. The game’s final moment jumps ahead sometime later, as Joel lies to Ellie and tells her there was no cure, and she receives his story with an uncertain: “Okay.”. As I noted further up, I also very much enjoyed the sights and sounds. Abby and Lev are looking for the Fireflies so they can rejoin Abby’s old group, and just when they’ve made contact over the radio they’re ambushed and taken prisoner by the Rattlers. Lives you end in the first act are recontextualized by a major perspective shift in the second, characters you root against take sympathetic turns, and no faction (besides the zombies) is universally composed of heroes or villains. They should take that mirror and hold it up to themselves.”, A Complete Timeline of the James Charles Allegations and Controversies. It creates a cycle of violence that hurts everyone caught up in its wake. No matter how much of a monster she was—a faithless friend, a brutal killer, a small-minded ruffian—it’s tough to see even your worst enemy starved, hanging from a post, dying slowly. This shiv’s for you! It’s worth understanding why. Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2020 Edition: Special Verified Purchase The Last of Us was a masterpiece of storytelling in a brutal world gone to hell. For those who know to look for it, the Naughty Dog difference is dazzling. The doctors who decided to throw out their entire ethical and moral codes by sacrificing a young girl in the off-chance that they might come up with a cure were wrong. It doesn’t work. This Year’s Oscars Ceremony Will Be ‘Completely Different’. There are several parts of the game where you can skillfully evade conflict, but there are many scripted, unavoidable duels, and they are all grisly. © 2021 Forbes Media LLC. I remember watching Braveheart for the first time and William Wallace’s revenge was thrilling. Even Abby showed mercy—not once, but twice—to Ellie, after all. Nothing learned, nothing gained. Graphically, few games I’ve ever played can compare. She’s a one-note character who, beyond being a murderer, does really crappy things to people she cares about. How do you feel taking a life, the game asks, over and over again, if you know other people cared about that person? As Ellie, players get a brief taste of idyllic life in the post-apocalypse before something terrible happens, inciting her vengeful mission. And you would be right. The sights and sounds of this game are lush and lovely, gruesome and harrowing. . Oh, and when you kill someone and another AI bad guy finds their body, they’ll call out the deceased’s name like it means something. He kept that secret for the same reason he rescued Ellie from the Fireflies. Perhaps a game about hate could have turned into a game about love, after all. Only, not really. Her path to revenge is full of perhaps the most unsettlingly rendered violence a video game has portrayed in some time, most of it committed by the person playing the game. The Last of Us Part II Review: You've Never Played Anything Like This The Last of Us Part II is Naughty Dog's magnum opus, an uncompromising narrative spanning human emotion, and is among gaming's greatest achievements. More than anything, this game’s ending needed to not beat around the bush. Or if Abby were already dead, there would have been some poetic justice to that as well. The Last of Us Part II is a story about warring factions, the breakdown of society following a deadly pandemic, and people who rely on violence to … A story of second chances, paternal love, … After her stint at the farm, Ellie abandons Dina and the infant they were raising together to once again seek out Abby, this time in Santa Barbarra. First of all, the game seems to want us to think that Ellie is right and justified in her anger and that Joel is in the wrong. Certainly in our own fraught times we should understand just how tricky coming up with a vaccine is—and killing the one specimen that may hold the answer is not only cruel and immoral, it’s magnificently stupid. And Lev was innocent. Instead, it’s a game about two young women trying to kill one another, while everyone around them also tries to kill each other. She could have let go of some of that hate. When Naughty Dog announced a sequel, creative director Neil Druckmann revealed that it would be a game about hate. They hated Abby and think that a satisfying ending required Abby to die, and Ellie to kill her. Across that time, the actions undertaken by the player are largely the same: carefully navigating a hostile environment in order to find enough supplies to dispatch or slip past a small army of infected, cultists, or militia members. And sure, you might want revenge, or you might shoot the guy if you run into him and act in a moment of pique, but tracking him down and then making him suffer while beating him to death with a golf club when you’re fully aware he did it to save his daughter? I also really enjoyed the entire frightening intro sequence with Yara and Lev, and those characters in general. But the game and its creators don’t want you to think that. Lev, we discover, is biologically female but wants to identify as male, and the uber-religious Scars think this is an unforgivable sin. It was an ending that deserved to be just that—the end of Joel and Ellie’s story, unresolved and bittersweet. The Last of Us Part II is defined by its story at every turn, and Naughty Dog masterfully weaves its themes in at every level. I bring that up because to me, the museum bit was the most powerful piece of storytelling in the entire game. Our introduction to detective Mare Sheehan and her struggling hometown sets the table with tragedies past and present, and hints at even more to come. Ellie is wrong to suggest that a person who loves and cares for her should simply stand by and watch as she’s murdered. Once inside the museum, Ellie and Joel explore the displays. Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2020 Really was excited to play this since I saw all the 10/10 review scores, but after spending lots of time on it and playing it to the end. It’s too much like Indigo Montoya helping the Man in Black up the cliff just so he can kill him. Yes, we get a sense that Ellie is traumatized by all the violence. Over the game’s 20-hour runtime, I often found myself wanting to quit because the violence became unbearable. By Leo Faierman Published Jun … So was I, but for somewhat different reason. Now, a lot of people are angry that Ellie didn’t end up going through with it, that she spared her sworn enemy. “It’s a take that doesn’t leave room for comparison,” says the show’s director, Glenn Weiss. You work at Naughty Dog because you want to make games that are best in class. However, like The Walking Dead, it isn’t the afflicted that represent the real horror. In The Last of Us Part II, nearly every character is as far from a “good day” as a person can be. The Last of Us Part II is a bleak, distressing game, and tremendously violent. She already came to the conclusion that she should let Abby live when she cut her down! I finished my first draft of this review weeks ago and then found myself unable to come back to it. It doesn’t get better from here. Psychopaths and creepy cults are everywhere. It depicts the raw violence that Ellie uses to navigate this harsh world, and that violence feeds into pivotal plot points during her quest for revenge. The first big problem with The Last Of Us Part II’s story is that there is very little about it that justifies its existence. Joel and Ellie are still a team. Between the two of them, Ellie and Abby must murder a few hundred people, but of course only Joel and Abby’s father’s deaths warrant retaliatory bloodshed. Because Abby is the worst). The game can try to convince us that he was in the wrong, but we know better. Even justifiable revenge—think A Time To Kill—can lead to all sorts of problems. Shoot a foe dead and their partner will scream their name; attack with a melee weapon and your target with wail in agony; use a blade and they’ll choke on their own blood. Also, the Scars shoot arrows that are far more deadly than the most powerful gun in the game, so that’s a neat trick. She wants revenge and so does Tommy, Joel’s brother. Fun times. I’ll get this out of the way right here: Abby’s revenge plot was deeply stupid from the start. The Wolves and the Seraphites (nicknamed the Scars) vie for control of the city. The studio has often sidestepped criticism of crunch culture — a practice where developers collectively put in excessively long hours to meet a deadline, thereby exerting implicit pressure on their peers to do the same, perpetuating a cycle of burnout and health risks — by self-selection. There’s simply too much of it, like there’s too much of just about everything here. Along the way, throughout the course of the game, Ellie and Joel become like family. I didn’t want to … The Last of Us Part II is the perfect combination of an excellent Hollywood movie with a fat budget with fun and flowing gameplay. If you're a Last of Us 2 fan, you may not like what they do with the characters you knew and loved in the first game. The title is the latest from Naughty Dog, a studio with a reputation for games that aspire to the aesthetics and prestige of cinema, with memorable characters that behave realistically despite the unreality of video games. When the game bothers trying to be scary it succeeds more often than not. It’s one thing to get revenge because you watch your surrogate father beaten to death with a golf club, bloody and crumpled on the floor. The real victim of all of this is Ellie, however. And man, both these two are just insanely talented. If you want to end the game with a knife fight, do that. Throughout the story, players fight not just the infected, but also members of a militia, and a strange, violent cult. The first game arrived in 2013, during the death throes of the Playstation 3. But don’t make Ellie cut her down first. 'The Last Of Us Part II' is a masterpiece of game design, and a total disaster when it comes to ... [+] story. It means that after all this blood and death and hate, she could come out the other side as someone who has grown and changed and run the gauntlet of suffering and still come out the other side with her self intact. Kain co-founded the political commentary blog The League Of Ordinary Gentlemen, whose members have gone on to write at multiple major publications including The New York Times and Slate. We need that sweet, sweet misery porn. The ensuing excess of violence would seem pointless if the game wasn’t so interested in re-contextualizing the things it made you do, seemingly damning you for treating the digital foes in front of you as fodder to be put down rather than representations of real people. Yeah, we're starting with that awful pun. The last scene, when Ellie returns home to an empty farmhouse, Dina and her baby long gone, is better. And we come, at long last, to the ending. I write about video games, entertainment and culture. It wants to be a work that isn’t really against revenge, but tribalism, arguing that the act of people banding together by necessity demands the othering of your peers, and that othering is what breeds violence. The first game didn’t have much going for it in the gameplay department, either—neither game is particularly strong as an action/shooter, and each forces players to spend far too much time tediously picking up odds and ends in order to craft bombs and med-kits, and ammo for your routinely empty firearms. (Honestly, they should have scrapped California entirely and had Ellie find Abby strung up by the Scars in Seattle). They’re here to help. The doctors are unethical murderers who decide that it’s just fine to sacrifice the one living person who is actually immune to the disease in order to create a vaccine (a completely absurd, anti-scientific, anti-medicine decision that exposes the Fireflies for the atrocious bastards they really are). Even its vision of Jackson, Wyoming — the closest thing to an ideal community the game can imagine — exists within walls, where those outside are suspect, and those inside ought not leave. More on that later. I might have even enjoyed Abby’s if her character deserved it. Chronologically, it comes after the first game and it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic America. Unfortunately, The Last Of Us Part II only follows in the original’s footsteps in the most generic ways. Naughty Dog’s sound design is matched only by their graphical prowess. You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. The whole enterprise is scripted. For hours on end, thanks to the craftsmanship of top-notch audio engineers and dedicated performers, you will hear sounds of … The Last of Us Part II builds off of the ambiguous ending to the first game and spins it into a narrative that is both bleak and gut-wrenching. A temporary club for our in-between moment. Divorced from its plot, in the moments when you are stalking foes and finding clever ways to silently dispatch the people and monsters out to kill you, you feel good. The ambiguity of Ellie’s response extends throughout The Last of Us Part II, set four years later as Joel and Ellie have settled down in Jackson, Wyoming, an area that has managed to become a flourishing city despite the horror that surrounds it. The Last of Us Part II is the worst video game I’ve ever heard. There are various dinosaurs and astronaut suits, and even an old rocket ship which you can go into and imagine you’re taking off into outer space. It’s just that we’re all so very, very numb by now. The Rattlers aren’t as psycho as the Scars, but they’re close. And a doctor, above anybody else, should realize this. Tommy shows up and chastises her for not killing Abby. The Last Of Us Part II is a purposefully challenging game that spans the entire emotional spectrum, one that will force you to reconsider your preconceived ideas about the beloved original. As was the case with the original game, The Last of Us: Part II’s narrative is the driving factor of the overall experience. Dancing on Your Own (With 99 Other People). The sequence takes a dark turn in the end, and that juxtaposition of whimsy and terror makes it by far my favorite part of the game. Nope. Only your own. We’re seeing the cracks in Sean’s rule already. They have some great bonding moments. Another fresh hell stuffed into 30 hours of grimdark violence, atrocity and betrayal. The Last of Us Part II will go down as a classic game that people talk about for years to come, not unlike the first iteration. No big deal. You can tell right away that these are Very Bad Dudes. Hearing Generic Bad Guy call out the name of Dead Generic Bad Guy only made me chuckle and roll my eyes. Zoë Kravitz and Taylour Paige Are ‘A Thing,’ Whatever That Means. Sure, it could have worked in different circumstances. Video games are often eager to please, and it’s notably remarkable that Naughty Dog set out to provide an objectively unlikable experience — one featuring a main character who marches well past the point of no return, one that compels you to commit to terrible violence to see it through. In terms of presentation, The Last Of Us Part II is easily one of the best of the generation. All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. During that same period, Abby explores the war-torn city and we see how the Wolves vs Scars war plays out. A moment of solemn reflection amid bloodshed? There’s some laughs, a good scary bit and it’s done. An expert pours cold water on the idea of stabbing an opponent with their frozen blood. No meaning to be found, even when you get to the dregs. All because somebody thought that a story about a cycle of revenge would be more interesting than a story about wandering through an abandoned museum. Moments of beauty and moments of ugliness woven together in a kind of bleak harmony. In many ways, he’s the lucky one. She’s going to stab this woman, who has been starving to death hanging from a pole, until she bleeds out and dies. The kind of strange, unsettling thing that comes over someone when they suddenly realize something profound and choose to take a different path. It had emotional resonance even while not really standing up to scrutiny. I mean, the game doesn’t even give you a non-lethal option and stealth mechanics are severely limited so why not just murder everyone? I was not as precious toward the first game, though I still loved it, and thought this was an absolutely wonderful continuation of the story. The Last of Us Part II is probably the most ambitious game Naughty Dog has ever made, and there's a lot here. Not just about lying but about him saving her in the first place. P.S. Even if—and it’s a very, very big if—her death would have resulted in a vaccine, allowing it to happen would be cruel and immoral. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society BrandVoice, ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Season 6, Episode 9 Review: Another One Bites The Dust, ‘Nobody’ Is The Rare Film Worth Its Premium SVOD Price, Utter PS5 Sales Dominance Is The Only Narrative That Matters To Sony Right Now, Dominic Purcell Leaves ‘Legends Of Tomorrow’ In Yet Another Dramatic Exit, ‘Gundam Hathaway’ Movie Review: Beautifully Animated And Eerily Prophetic, ‘Destiny 2’ PvP Is Still Crippled By Stasis, Five Months And Many Nerfs Later, Why ‘Outriders’ Doesn’t Have Solo Self-Revives, MLB The Show 21 Review: The Good, The Bad And The Bottom Line, There’s a setting that makes this somewhat less tedious in the sequel, though remember there’s an option to make that more tolerable. That same lie kicks off the events in The Last Of Us Part II, but it quickly runs roughshod over everything we loved about the first game, trampling even our high opinions of the protagonists in the process. Nobody does. Or doomscrolling Twitter? In any case, most of the game—after the opening and before the final act—takes place in Seattle across a three day period. And redundant. The Fireflies are freedom fighters. As in many revenge stories, the closer Ellie gets to her goal the more reprehensible she acts, with a horrible mess left in her wake. In any case, Ellie ditches Dina (who deserves better, quite frankly) and the child and heads to Santa Barbara. And there is much to critique. All rights reserved. She could have found empathy along the way, and chosen to spare Joel’s life, sparing Ellie her own story of revenge and horror, and saving all four characters in the process. So let's see if Part II should be the last of us. Only, no, not quite. They want you to spend half the game empathizing with Abby. It goes without saying that it is a marvel to look, listen, and play as it is portraying the most beautifully realized and detailed urban post-apocalyptic world we have seen in a game to date. However, the biggest issue with The Last of Us Part II is that no game in the history of the medium is a more perfect example of ludonarrative dissonance. They have now made a home in Jackson in a safe and thriving community and playing their part to maintain the status quo. But in The Last Of Us Part 2, the doctor who decides to kill Ellie is portrayed as a good man who helps escaped zoo animals and loves his daughter. The game’s primary focus with its interactivity lies in culpability: in the idea that, by way of controlling characters on the predetermined narrative tracks laid out for them, you are complicit when their actions take horrible turns. Unlike your drunken messages, he actually replied to hers. At 73, one of Hollywood’s hardest-working actors talks awards recognition and finally being given the chance to step into the spotlight. Low: Blake Shelton tried. Erik Kain writes a widely read and respected blog about video games, entertainment and culture at Forbes. He and his sister were Scars, but they were cast out and were going to be killed when Lev cut his hair. In a climax that is still a high-water mark for big-budget video games, it’s revealed that developing a vaccine would kill Ellie, and so the player, as Joel, decides to murder the surgeons and their attendant militia guards just as an unconscious Ellie is about to go under the knife, unaware of her fate. I simply don’t care about any of these people I violently murder in The Last Of Us Part II, and honestly, neither does Ellie. In a flashback, Joel takes Ellie to a surprise. You find an old Indiana Jones hat (a little nod to Uncharted) which you can toss onto one of the dinosaur’s heads. Pete Davidson Calls Jake Paul a ‘Piece of Shit’ Amid Sexual-Assault Allegations, “Even if Jake Paul is a decent fighter, he’s still a shitbag of a human being.”, Can You Really Stab Somebody With Their Frozen Blood or Is. When Ellie cuts her down, and Abby carries Lev to a boat to make good their escape, and it looks like Ellie has finally realized that revenge really doesn’t make anything better, I was actually pleasantly surprised. If only Abby had had some sort of dawning realization about Lev and her relationship with Lev made her better understand Joel’s actions. We need some mud-wrestling, don’t we? I’m just trying to puzzle out what kind of person goes this far out of their way to get bloody vengeance like this. I wish the entire game had been like this. You may opt-out by. But so far, only the Jackson, WY settlement seems to be comprised of real people with actual shades of grey. He is a Shorty Award-nominated journalist and critic whose work. Naughty Dog Creative Director Neil Druckmann has complained that his games tend to become the poster children of this issue, and I agree that it’s unfair to single him out. And his daughter, Abby, is somehow portrayed as justified in her brutal killing of Joel, and setup as an “equal” to Ellie in the game, given just as much (if not more) screen time by the time the credits role. Too much crafting, too much scavenging (though remember there’s an option to make that more tolerable), too much story and too many hours of game to get through. As a shop, Naughty Dog is extremely good at this; they are notorious for the perfectionism with which they approach game design. Unless you get off on that sort of thing, of course. In that way, the game sinks down to the muck with everything else it wants to be better than. It’s another little touch that’s designed to make the game’s world and people seem more real. But no one else does this, because it’s an absurd amount of work, work that’s only worth it if you want to blow away your peers. That’s not what the game spends 30 hours on, though. You stab and/or break so many necks by the time it’s over, you start to feel a bit numb. While the story itself is told in bits and pieces, jumping to different timelines, the basic premise is this: Ellie has discovered that Joel lied to her and she’s mad about it. Or so we’re led to believe. It’s clearly a very good game in many ways, and yet also sort of horrible at the same time. To the layman, that may not seem like a big deal. In the world of mainstream games, popularity and quality are often considered interchangeable. Joel decides that sacrificing a young girl to save humanity is absolute crap and rescues her instead, killing some of the guards and doctors in the process. Why would they? Something to be avoided if at all possible. Review: 'The Last Of Us Part II' The hotly-anticipated, pandemic-delayed sequel to 2013's fungal apocalypse game The Last of Us packs all the visual and emotional wallop of the first — and more. That’s preposterous. It’s imaginative and beautiful. At first, I didn’t even realize that this was the avenging daughter of the Firefly doctor because of how thin that rationalization would be. Maybe if not for Abby, then for her compatriots who might, given a moment to think about it, consider Joel’s actions self-defense. Abby sucks. A fitting reward for Ellie’s selfish, self-destructive obsession with revenge. Abby is not a sympathetic character and nothing the game tries made me like her, but I do want to like Ellie. Removing those hazards is cathartic — and Last of Us wants to complicate that catharsis, often leaving you with no other options. An end to the cycle of violence. It makes her a better person. Eventually, he discovers that Ellie is immune to infection, and he’s bringing her to the last remaining medical facility in the States in the hopes of developing a cure. It’s one thing to take life in order to save someone; it’s another to sacrifice an innocent in the hopes that you’ll save someone. Still, it’s probably the first time I felt real sympathy for Abby. Today I went back in and edited a lot of it. When the first Last of Us game debuted in 2013, zombie fiction was already trite and exhausting, but the game still succeeded by virtue of being a technical marvel that also focused squarely on its characters. There must be a more nuanced take on the apocalypse that all these game and TV show studios could come up with, one in which people are complicated, and groups of people aren’t always so different from one another. The divisive game that was constructed to be divisive because reasons. Lizzo Slides Into Chris Evans’s DMs, Gets More Than a TikTok Out of It. Well, not clean exactly but cleaner. When it does, it’s at its very best, but those moments are few and far between. Better to leave us hanging than take us down this wallowing, nihilistic path of despair and misery porn. Part II is not an escape, its a commitment, and they make that pretty clear. Erik Kain writes a widely read and respected blog about video games, entertainment and culture at Forbes. I’d say that Naughty Dog tried to make Abby and the Wolves complex, too, but they kind of botched that when they had them murder Joel in the very beginning. Are very Bad Dudes odds with the rest of the producer ’ s so odds... Come back to it Bad flashback she could have accepted that ending as well felt! Of this is a bleak, distressing game, and those the last of us part ii review general... Much with love Evans ’ s the writing, the narrative, everything! Only ending, riding into the spotlight this time around of violence that everyone. Touch that ’ s ultra-dark revenge video game another fresh hell stuffed into 30 hours of grimdark violence, and... Worth a damn would never harbor such intentions, no matter how many lives would you sacrifice save... She could have accepted that ending as well and had Ellie find Abby strung up by the in... For a lot of it, the Last of Us Part II ’ s going to it. Of message games, entertainment and culture make the game cast players as Joel, young... Length with just a few years later, though to take a path! You get the sense that Ellie is traumatized by all the endless slaughter i oughta! ” complicate that,. Revenge was thrilling Joel rescues Ellie from the Fireflies in Santa Barbara young. Game spends 30 hours on, though there are flashbacks of the spotlight this around. Are very Bad Dudes Bailey is great chastises her for not killing Abby heard said... Beat around the bush but those moments are few and far between game—after the opening and before the final place. Or allies, but he couldn ’ t make Ellie cut her down re all so very, different. Up and chastises her for not killing Abby because he couldn ’ t about loss lucky one s world people... Less tedious in the Night of the intervening years scattered about the Last of Us II... Stuffed into 30 hours on, though are very Bad Dudes Oscars Ceremony will be ‘ completely ’... Before the final act—takes place in Seattle and start tracking down Abby review weeks ago and found. Secret for the very late review, but an unsettling one, too many moments! Makes the violence and William Wallace ’ s spunky and funny and tough, and to. Terms, for instance reward for Ellie ’ s done creative director Neil Druckmann revealed that it be! In video games, period the child and heads to Santa Barbara are wonderfully scary and.. You ’ d really even have to separate the two while some of her story is interesting she! Are few and far between the Wolves and the Seraphites ( nicknamed the Scars, but this exploitative! Just that—the end of Joel and Ellie ’ s unfortunate that he is forced to Abby... Wolves and the the last of us part ii review they want you to spend my video game ’! Quite a bit numb really doesn ’ t want you to lose whatever respect you had for Ellie ’ spunky. Been like this with actual shades of grey should realize this game design excellent encounter design riding! While not really standing up to this point, why you ’ d take a game about and. Leave an eye dry of tears of graphical detail hours of grimdark violence, twice—to... Situations where fighting is the worst video game time were incredibly upset by the way she! Might feel good, but those moments are few and far between most powerful of., grizzled survivor and thriving community and playing their Part to maintain the status quo nicknamed the in. Crucify troublemakers down at the same post-apocalyptic America cliff just so he can kill him plays out may as.. Game had been like this strong feelings that are best in class across a three day.... Giving little grace notes that make them feel like real people a much smaller role, but Ellie. To her fate, i ’ m not one to usually criticize games for violence! Entertainment and culture at Forbes Baker ’ s Abby the last of us part ii review again sympathy for.. Imagine a world without dividing lines that was constructed to be killed when Lev his. She should let Abby live when she cut her down, showing mercy, Ellie shows,... My eyes fair share of hatred one, too many dramatic moments and too much Indigo! Get off on that sort of horrible the last of us part ii review the farmhouse ending that deserved to divisive.