I want to start this pseudo-review by acknowledging the societal tension around these two games in tandem. Ignoring any of the perspectives given on either of these games, in my opinion, will leave you with a lesser understanding of your entire experience with them.

Before diving into the meat of this tension, we must first establish a foundation for this discussion. The Last of Us starts us in the shoes of a normal father named Joel before quickly thrusting him into the chaos of a zombie apocalypse. Through the beginning stages of this outbreak, a US soldier ends up killing Joel’s daughter, forcing Joel to reckon with this new hellish world alone. After a 20 year time skip, we see a hollowed version of the man we met going through the motions to survive.

While surviving in a world full of zombies isn’t necessarily the most innovative premise, the narrative focuses less on the world and more on humanizing each character in the world. The game motivates you by laying out a simple goal: deliver a zombie-virus resistant kid (Ellie) to the scientists (Fireflies) and save the world. By the end of the game, however, Joel’s world has already been saved by the mere existence of Ellie, giving him renewed purpose and breaking the ice that has frozen his psychological and emotional state since the beginning of the outbreak.

There are a lot of positive things to say about TLOU1, despite the negative things I am about to say about it. I wanted to point out and flesh out some of these criticisms in here because many people who criticize TLOU2  use TLOU1 as a comparison while forgetting or ignoring some of the worse parts of the first game. For proof of this, as of the time of writing, Metacritic has TLOU1 listed at a 92-user score and a 95-critic score, while TLOU2 has a 5.8 user score and a 93-critic score.

The first thing that needs to be addressed is the gameplay of TLOU. It will come as no surprise to veterans of triple-A games that TLOU fails to provide any sort of innovative take on its gameplay, opting to focus instead on narrative and realism. It isn’t as bad as other games that focus explicitly on story (like Hellblade  or A Plague Tale), but feels extremely similar Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, Just Cause, and many other single-player, triple-A titles created between 2008 and 2013. This was especially noticeable in my playthrough as I played on one of the harder difficulties, which makes you engage with the mechanics of the game a little more than a lower difficulty playthrough will. 

Loot in both The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2 is poorly tuned. On lower difficulties, the game provides too many items, making it hard to get rid of it faster than you get it. 

On higher difficulties, the supplies are given to you in a torturous drip feed, leaving the player to feel guilty every time they pull the trigger or use one of the supplies. Personally, I love the challenge that the higher difficulty brings, as it forces me to get creative with mechanics that would be overlooked on easier difficulties. But as is the case with higher difficulties in most triple-A games, the extremeness of the challenge regularly pushes the player to look beyond creative solutions towards solutions that abuse mechanics. 

For example, as I continuously struggled to secure resources, I found that enemies will drop more ammo for guns you have low ammo on. If there’s an enemy camp with 10-20 people, I should probably expect to find a lot of supplies not only in the camp itself, but on the bodies of the people with guns. However, if you are well-stocked before killing those enemies, they won’t actually drop anything for you. On the other hand, if you waste all your ammo killing the people in the camp, looting the bodies will give you notable amounts of ammo back, more than if you looted the camp before looting the bodies. Decisions involving survival of the zombie-infested world should involve choices involving aspects of the narrative itself (do I want to risk taking on these people or just skip them?), instead of the mechanics of the gameplay. 

This small example helps illustrate a larger issue at play in the gameplay of TLOU: ludonarrative dissonance. Ludonarrative dissonance is a big scary phrase that basically means there is a dissonance between the story being told through cutscenes/dialogue and the story being told to you through gameplay. Another good example of this in TLOU would be when you kill human enemies with guns. As a person in the real world, I know if I choked a guy to death and he had a gun, I would likely be able to take the gun itself and the ammo in it and use it. This is simply not true in TLOU’s higher difficulties. If you kill an enemy that has never fired their gun, there is an extremely high chance that their gun will have no ammo in it. 

Again, by itself, this could be an interesting way to tell a part of the story. I could believe that certain people in the gangs of this zombie apocalypse world are outfitted with guns with no ammo to give these gangs a sense of power to outsiders.  The outbreak of an apocalypse would likely cause most of the bullets stockpiled to be gone, and with no source of continually manufactured bullets, groups would theoretically run out quickly. 

But if you kill an enemy that fired 5 or 6 shots, restart from checkpoint, kill that same enemy with one shot to the head, and loot their corpse, they will no ammo on them. Fine, suspend disbelief. Enemies have magic guns that have ammo when they fight you and soon as they die it all disappears. That’s part of the difficulty, whatever. 

What’s frustrating about this system is that having scant resources seems like it would be a major theme to both players and even enemies throughout the world. But characters tend not to care much about resources unless the story demands it. Whether it’s in the scene where Tess dies, keeping all her gathered supplies to herself as she goes out in a blaze of martyrdom, or it’s the cinematic scene where Joel must kill zombies with his infinite ammo pistol while Ellie cuts Joel down from a homemade trap, the narrative regularly disrespects players who buy into the vision of a zombie-infested world with scant resources, desperately clinging to every arrow and bullet they can get their hands on. Thus, we have on our hands a dissonance between how the players experience the gameplay and the story being told.

Although some of the core gameplay mechanics suffer from ludonarrative dissonance, I will take a moment to acknowledge that some of the more important storytelling done to the player takes this into account and adjusts how its story is told accordingly. For example, Joel’s relationship with Ellie is developed extremely well. Joel’s relationship with his daughter is established, taken away, and then you are given a time skip of 20 years. To people familiar with storytelling or life, 20 years is a long time. However, if we examine how much Joel’s character has changed over time, you’ll see that very little has happened to him.

Even with this flaccid narrative tool skewing justification for Joel killing Firefly soldiers and the one man that could develop a vaccine, Joel throws away the justification at the end in a selfish act of emotional necessity. I love this because Joel lies to Ellie to use her to emotionally satisfy his own selfish needs. This might just be me, but I would put that almost on the same level as one of the main villains, David, a guy who wants Ellie to be his child wife or to eat her, basically to consume her physically in any way that he can. But, if you think about it, Joel also wants to “consume” Ellie, to use her for his own emotional and psychological gain instead of saving others. David’s use of Ellie is personally evil to her and unintentionally to the rest of the world, but Joel  intentionally deprives the world of a cure and slaughters tens of people to sate his own desires,.  

My view that Joel is (highly understandably) evil fuels my understanding and analysis of The Last of Us 2. When we get into TLOU2, about four years have passed since Joel took Ellie away from the hospital and stashed her away in Jackson. While we don’t see it directly, it is clear that there is tension between Joel and Ellie. The years in Jackson have changed Ellie for the worse, making her much more cynical and despondent than she was in TLOU. We don’t get a lot of explanation for this until much later in the game, but I think it’s shown that Joel has drifted apart from Ellie and is trying his best to reconnect with her (first guitar scene). The developers attempt to develop characters like Dina, Jesse, and Abby in a fairly short period to varying degrees of success as they all play significant roles later in the game.

Abby then kills Joel. I guess people think this was a controversial way to push the game forward. I’ve heard people who played the game say: “You’re telling me this muscled-up bitch just tortures Joel to death for nothing? He didn’t save Ellie or some shit; he just dies like a dog?” Yeah, he did. And guess what, he deserved it too. What he did was fucked up to: a) the world and b) Abby, Fireflies, and the hundreds of people Joel killed. Joel had worked hard towards redeeming his messed-up past in Jackson, but the things he did cannot just be forgotten by the world at large. A lot of people in this new landscape, where there is no governmental enforcement of justice, must look to find and deliver their own justice (revenge).

For this reason, as well, the ending also makes people bristle. The game sells you on revenge against Abby, but then tells us a story of a girl killing hundreds of people, most of whom also have blood on their hands but who are nevertheless people, to the point where she has completely hollowed herself out as a person. By the end, Ellie’s decisions are completely unrecognizable to the player, something that many have rightly criticized the game for doing. Most exceptional video games tend to give the player some aspect of choice in the actions the character you are playing takes, steering the fate of your character’s destiny in a unique direction. You are not allowed to do this in TLOU2. Instead, you are forced to watch in horror as one of the characters you love makes decision after decision, leading herself down a path you have no say in.

Now, some people claim that the character’s actions in the story and the character’s actions during gameplay are dissonant because one promotes nonviolence and the other doesn’t. I have kind of flip-flopped on my feelings on this. On the one hand, I love games like Bastion and Knights of the Old Republic which give the player agency over some of the game’s most critical decisions. But I also understand that an ambiguous sort of ending doesn’t work well in a multi-installment franchise. I understand that it’s tough to sit by and watch as Ellie tortures and kills Abby’s friends, which the game doesn’t even give you the option to sit out of and instead forces you to press the square button to stab and smack these people to death.

I went to watch a criticism of the game after I finished to help myself understand where the hate for the game was coming from. I ended up watching a video from NakeyJakey, a creator who seemed to give some balanced takes in the past on things in an entertaining way. He makes some interesting arguments mainly on the idea of consistency and choice throughout TLOU2. He brings up Ellie being inconsistent because she kills so many people to get to Abby, but by the end, when she has the power to finally enact her vengeance, she decides not to go through with it. He cites this as a criticism but to me, this feels like the point of the game. The character development of Ellie occurs through the violence that Ellie enacts on others and not just in the cutscenes. The furthest I could go on that criticism is that there could be a little bit more consequence to the actions that you take. For example, in the morgue scene, there could be more bodies based on how many you killed throughout the game. You can’t change that there will be bodies there, but based on how many you kill, maybe there could be different dialogue on the severity of the losses.

I will also say, for me, there were moments in TLOU2 where I felt like the gameplay didn’t really align with the narrative all that well. In particular, I felt that when Isaac decides to kill Abby and sets the Wolves against her, I still didn’t feel totally sold that Abby wanted to kill any of her former comrades. I also felt like Abby’s absence and Isaac’s order in the last moment of his life wouldn’t be enough to sell some of the Wolves on Abby’s betrayal. So, I did what I could to not kill the Wolves during all the parts I could. This changed when I tried to charge through a diner base being used by the Wolves, and it was impossible for me to get through without killing people. I did what I could to make sure that no one saw me, completely stealth killing every Wolf so that no one knew that it was Abby that killed her own friends and they could assume that the Scars killed them. 

This once again changed when I got to Haven and the war was in full force, making me enact violence on people I did not want to kill. Now that I think about it though, it seems like these moments are the culmination of an ultimate distaste for violence. She escapes Haven and wants nothing more to do with violence, but instead, she gets back to the aquarium only to find Owen and Mel dead on the floor. She then goes to the theater to find 1. The sniper who killed her Wolf friend 2. Ellie, who she spared the life of. She then has to reckon with re-engaging with violence in a very real way. She tracks down Ellie and is about to kill her when Dina tries to save Ellie. Abby is a killing machine though and easily brings the dagger to the neck of Dina. Ellie pleads for Dina’s life, saying that she’s pregnant, to which Abby simply replies “Good.” Only through the intervention of Lev is Dina’s life saved. Only through the bonds which we make with others can we save ourselves, a stunning and beautiful parallel to Joel’s story from the first game. Through death and destruction, both Abby and Ellie begin to lose themselves, and it is only through the rejection or acceptance of others that they can move forward and really find who they need to be or lose themselves entirely. Ellie similarly finds herself in the darkest moment of her life, as she chokes the malnourished Abby, who has no will to kill her and only wants to escape the slavers with Lev. It is in this dark moment where she thinks back to her last full conversation with Joel. The justification for her rampage comes into full light as well. While she was still mad with Joel, she wanted to do everything she could to have a relationship with him. And even though she comes to this realization, it’s all too late as Abby shows up to Jackson to take her revenge the very next day. It is this anger and guilt that she could not reconnect with Joel, that she wasted her last precious years with him being angry, it is these emotions that fuel her crusade through Seattle.

Ultimately, TLOU2’s themes are simple at their core: war bad, violence bad, revenge bad, bonds between others good. But it’s the telling of this story in this medium that makes it so impactful. That being said, I would still criticize the gameplay as being too linear, the style of gameplay still forces the player to make calculations, however with custom difficulty there are elements you can change like upping the difficulty to max but setting the resources to much higher. Another incredible thing I would mention is the settings are probably the best of almost any game I’ve seen. Super accessible to disabled people and a bunch of cool options for those that want them, including custom difficulty off the bat. I would have criticized this as a hollow gesture for niche gamers, but this paired with the fact that they removed trophies for completing certain difficulties encourages players to mess around with the settings to find the right difficulty for themselves. I would have desired a little bit more depth to some of the story elements or for things to be plotted in a way that people didn’t have such a problem with the story, but speaking to my own experience I enjoyed it a ton and didn’t feel like the issues others had with the game were rooted in some sort of justified principle. If you have played through the game and are for some reason reading this, I would love to know specific reasons why you didn’t like it that might speak to what I’ve said or the spirit of what I said. I think there is room for criticism but I’m not exactly sure what it is the game did that got people as angry as it did.

Some important things I remembered after letting my brain fold once or twice after writing this. I realized two things about the plot that might prime people to make them more or less angry at the plot. The first thing is that my understanding of the game’s events flows from one thing to another. I wrote about this more extensively above, but to synthesize this down more, I think Joel is a bad person, so Joel dying doesn’t bother me except for the fact that it hurts Ellie. In this way, I am invested in Ellie going to Seattle and seeking revenge on Abby. Because I am invested in Ellie killing Abby, people standing in my way through gameplay are on the table to kill. Ellie and Abby are both killing machines, so they both have no problem killing tons of people, but both Ellie and Abby find personal consequences for violence because of their interactions with each other. Abby realizes violence doesn’t solve anything, so she stops her participation in the cycle of violence, something that ultimately ends up saving her life when she’s a slave in Santa Barbara. Ellie, on the other hand, continues down the path of violence up to when she frees Abby. Just like other acts of mercy beget good for the individual in the long run, Ellie realizes at the absolute pinnacle of hatred and violence that she can let these feelings go through mercy and deliver unto herself that individual good, despite the difficulty of letting that revenge go.

To put it another way, to understand why someone might not like TLOU2, I believe that you must be on board with a certain set of facts or, written in pseudo-logical terms: If A is true, then B will be true; if B is true, then C will be true; and if C is true, then D will be true. The problem is a lot of people that play through both games will disagree with one or two of these statements. I believe a lot of people see Joel’s decision to keep Ellie in the dark about what really happened at the hospital might not be justified but was a moral decision Joel was forced to make for the good of Ellie, the girl that he had been protecting across the country. So, when Joel is killed at the beginning of TLOU2, people don’t assume that perspective “A” is true, that Joel had it coming for his immoral and selfish decisions in the first game. Similarly, if you don’t believe in the corrosive effects of violence, you aren’t going to believe that the choice to spare Abby is an act of self-interest and self-preservation. To build to the conclusion, each card in the house of cards must have some buy-in from the player.

From my point of view, I would say the logic stripped down would be as follows:

1. If Joel has enacted violence against people for his own self-interest, then someone affected by his decision will come to kill him.
2. If Joel is killed, Ellie will pursue the killer with extreme prejudice.
3. If Ellie pursues the killer at all costs, she will sacrifice her own moral fabric that makes up her identity to enact her version of justice.
4. Ellie must not kill Abby to save herself.

NakeyJakey points to the fact that despite this message that we should give up violence throughout the entire narrative, the gameplay rewards you with little shiny things that help you commit more violence throughout the game and therefore continues gaming on a path of ludonarrative dissonance. I, however, would disagree with this. On the game’s face, I could see how playing through a game filled with violence just to be told “violence bad” would be an ironic and hilarious message of hypocrisy that only video games could truly accomplish. Think about your violence against humans in the game as Ellie. It starts and ends with Abby. You are rewarded for following down the path of violence with survival and enhanced means of survival, but you must play as a character that you feel less and less connected to, for some people even to the very end. In a sense, the cycle of violence ends when the video game ends, after both characters have chosen to stop directly participating in the cycle. Only through violence can you get to the “lesson” of violence being bad by the end. I find it almost impossible to have one without the other. Potentially there could’ve been a way to implement that same lesson through the gameplay in simple ways like the morgue scene, but I don’t believe the exclusion of a moral lesson through gameplay (which is debatable in and of itself through actions like killing dogs, hearing people beg for their lives, and people calling out for their friends by name) detracts from the messaging of the narrative.

The moral of TLOU2 is enacting non-survival, ideologically based/emotionally-based violence on others will net the person doing the violence a short-term benefit, whether that’s material or emotional, but in the long term will reflect on its actor in an equal or more harmful manner. On the other hand, refraining from this hyper-specific type of violence will net the actor a positive benefit.

Under this definition, the ludic elements line up with the narrative themes, albeit they would have lined up better with scenes that were influenced by your gameplay. If you keep committing this type of violence in the game, you may gain a short-term gain through the gameplay (more shiny bolts and pills to pop), but you do have to reckon with the fact that the people and a lot of times dogs you kill are represented in a realistic way. Are you okay with the idea of gaining a marginal advantage in a video game if it means you’re the type of person who derives pleasure or doesn’t give a second thought to executing a dog in front of its owner?

I think while the violence you enact against regular Wolf and Scar members in Seattle does not technically fit under the exact type of violence, I believe the story cautions against, I think that it’s peripheral and in the service of the ultimate type of violence. I don’t think Ellie, Abby, or the player suffer directly from this violence, but when it comes time for these characters to enact non-survival, ideologically based/emotionally based violence, they must ask themselves: is it worth the cost? If I blow up a dog with a trip mine and see its legs fly off its body while the owner screams, “Bear no!” in agony, I may think about how fucked up that was the next time I am looking at the enemies and see a dog (again, this doesn’t even technically qualify as ludonarrative dissonance because the narrative isn’t exactly opposing this sort of violence, which is something you can take issue with if you are a pacifist or something).