Beware this Blog is infected with spoilers
I am not a fan of zombie games, at all. The Last of Us was released back in 2013 and since it was a Naughty Dog game and having already played Crash Bandicoot and Uncharted and enjoying them immensely, I decided to see what it was about. I’m so glad I did because I found Last of Us to be incredible. Not only was it a brilliantly made game that was engaging with its game-play and scares and had a brilliant story, making an impact on the same level of films and books.
Seven years later we have finally got the sequel and… what a mess. Not the game itself, but the events leading up to it. There were major story leaks which made people turn against the game. I had looked at the leaks, I wish I hadn’t. The big controversy is of course the death of Joel. People hated that the game killed him off. I can understand the hate, it happened so early on in the game by some random woman that Joel had SAVED just moments before. Joel is a great character that we’ve seen go from a loving father to bitter and grieving over the loss of his daughter whilst the world becomes overtaken by an outbreak leading people to turn into horrific monsters. He then meets Ellie and is tasked with taking her to a group of rebels called the Fireflies for whatever reason. This was just a job however they form a bond that helps him get back that part of him that was lost, so much that he prevents the possibility of a vaccine that could save the world, because he couldn’t see Ellie die. There’s the argument that Joel action’s were awful and messed up but considering he literally saw Ellie to be like his daughter Sarah, he couldn’t go through the same loss again. So he only did what he thought was right, even if it meant killing the Fireflies.
I was really excited to learn about what direction The Last of Us Part II would go from there. I was hoping there’d be more exploration into Ellie’s immunity or her family, especially in case it’s a genetic thing. Then of course the leaks happened and it turned out that the game was going to focus on the aftermath of the the end of the first game from the point of view of a character who is the daughter of one of the doctors that was operating on Ellie that Joel had killed. This doctor was never a fully realised character in the first game, just an NPC. This sounded like a weak premise however on playing the game, I see what they were going for. Because we played as Joel and Ellie, it would be easy to consider them them the heroes and anyone else as a villains, however in a world like the one depicted in Last of Us, everyone is basically a villain. The thing is that, I think the first game already did this in far less overt way.
Having said that, I liked playing the Last of Us Part II. The game is good at getting you to think of strategies to get past obstacles, I found myself doing different approaches between segments with infected and segments with humans. Clickers and runners? Stealth them. Bloaters and the newly introduced shamblers? Throw stuff at them. Humans? Stealth them, unless there’s the player is accompanied with someone, go for attack. Humans with dogs? Ugh, the dogs in this game, I hated it when they appeared. I am in no way am affectionate towards dogs, but even I felt bad when I made them walk into a trap mine.
I can’t believe I’ve written almost 600 words and barely talked about Abby. Oh, Abby. Getting to play as her and point of view was interesting. That’s all I can say really because maybe halfway into her part of the game I was just really wanted it to be over and get to the big Ellie/Abby confrontation. Abby’s part of the game went on for too long which made trying to sympathising with her more difficult.
It did get a lot better when she comes accross a young boy called Lev and they become a team up, reminding a lot of Ellie and Joel. Lev comes from a cult-like group called the Seraphites who ousted him for going against their traditions. They are also at war with Abby’s group the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). Lev’s a pretty cool character and the Seraphites seem so fascinating compared to the generic trigger happy WLF. As for Abby, she’s… fine. I don’t like her that much but I don’t hate her just because she killed Joel or because of her character design. She gets some good character development because of Lev and the Rat King boss battle was fire.
We watch Ellie become devastated by Joel’s death that she now wants to get revenge on Abby. While she traverses through Seattle eliminating WLF members along the way there are a few flashbacks which were the best parts of the game simply because we get to see Joel again. They start off happy, Joel and Ellie spending time together in a museum having fun. Following ones, their relationship begins to strain, as Ellie doubts Joel’s words about what happened with the Fireflies so she goes back to the hospital where she was operated on and finds out the truth. I had assumed Joel died without ever having told her, but Ellie been knew. It then made sense why she seemed distant talking about Joel earlier in the game, she had been mortified by what he had done and the implications that the world was now extra doomed and for that he despised him.
There’s a bunch of side characters, including the residents at Jackson such as Dina, Ellie’s girlfriend who becomes pregnant, and Jesse who is Dina’s ex and also the father of her baby. Then there’s Abby’s friends including her ex-boyfriend Owen and her father’s student Mel who is pregnant with Owen’s child. Ellie and Abby have parallel stories that include parallel love triangles as well. I honestly didn’t feel attachment with any of these characters. I guess Owen and his aquarium was kind of endearing. I wanted to see more of the sinister leader of the WLF Issac, but the game didn’t give him a lot of screentime before he is killed off.
Ellie and Abby finally meet again, and then the boss battle begins. And the boss is Ellie! This was crazy, especially because it was just like the boss battle from the first game with David, where Abby has to sneak around an unhinged Ellie and try to overpower her. Abby of course does and then Dina manages to intervene only to get knocked out and Abby threatens to kill Dina. However she stops when she sees Lev is completely against this and then spares them, demanding that she never wants to see Ellie again.
There’s a bit of a time skip, which at first seemed like an epilogue. Dina had a baby boy called JJ and Ellie lives with them on a farm and they seem to have a nice simple life away from the chaos and danger.
Yet, all is not as sound as it seems as Ellie is still suffering PTSD from Joel’s death. I thought this was how the game was going to end, pretty sad but still hopeful that Ellie would one day overcome the nightmares by seeing JJ grow up. The game does not end there, it keeps going. I was in disbelief that the game still kept going. Ellie decides that she can’t let it go and leaves to find Abby, who is now in California with Lev chasing a rumour that there was a reform of the Fireflies. There’s a few standard encounters with infected while they search a house and manage to supposedly contact the Fireflies through a radio. They excitedly go to find them, however get captured by some new group of people called Rattlers. These are some depraved individuals that have imprisoned and tortured people and keep infected chained for their amusement. They felt shoehorned at this point for the purposed of having another obstacle for Ellie before she gets to Abby.
Ellie almost gets captured by the Rattlers however manages to get the upper hand and sneaks into their compound. There’s some really disturbing things going on in there, when Ellie finally gets to Abby she is completely dishevelled, and is only concerned with getting Lev back to safety and doesn’t want to fight.
Ellie forces her to and what ensues is the most depressing and brutal fight in game I have seen in a game. Ellie almost defeats Abby only to back out when she sees a vision of Joel sitting down with his guitar, instead of what she was seeing before of the moments of his death. She stops and lets Abby go. Then, the game ends with Ellie finally seeming to have find some sense of closure, and it was a truly exhausting ordeal to have gotten here, for Ellie and the player.
The game ends with another Joel and Ellie flashback the night before they went on the patrol where Joel was killed. This scene broke me. Up until this point they Ellie was still upset with him, but after he stood up for her in an confrontation with a bigoted idiot, she decides that she wants to give Joel a chance to mend their relationship. And that was the last of Joel and Ellie being together.
This is definitely the longest blog post I have ever written, as there is so much in this game. There is too much in this game. It was way, way longer than it needed to be which is the only real problem I had with it. The story wasn’t as compelling as the first game, but it was still a gripping story exploring revenge. Revenge doesn’t heal was the message I got from it. Hopefully in Part III, Abby and Ellie get some well deserved therapy, if that still exists in the Apocalypse.
At My Desk 