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apatheticaria · 4 years

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my spoilery thoughts on the last of us part ii

i apologize in advance for this super long post that you have to scroll past because i don’t know how to do the “keep reading” option thing

the only reason i’m writing this out is because i’m literally going insane from not being able to talk about my feelings for this game to anyone since no one i know actually cares lmao so this is mainly just for myself and anyone who wants to read this

the intro:

as i played through this game, i also watched a few playthroughs up until the point where i stopped to take a break. this was a game i couldn’t binge just because it’s so heavy and intense and sometimes you just gotta step away and take a breather

one of the playthroughs i followed along with was jacksepticeye’s and at the end he gave his review of the game like he normally does. i didn’t completely agree with everything he said, but for the most part i thought what he said lined up pretty well with my own opinion.

in particular, one thing that stood out to me was when he said that the introduction to this game shouldn’t have been Joel talking to Tommy about what he did at the end of the first game, but rather the whole flashback of Ellie’s birthday at the museum. then at “one” during the countdown to liftoff, the screen should’ve went black and fast forwarded to four-years-older Ellie opening her eyes in her home in Jackson (idk if i’m explaining this well, but Jack’s editor, Robin, edits this together and really sold it to me. if you wanna see it, go to the last part of Jack’s playthrough and look for it towards the last 30 minutes). i think this would have given us the time i think we all needed with Joel before he died and all the following flashbacks would be more focused on how/why Joel and Ellie’s relationship turned so distant - or hostile on Ellie’s part - and could’ve helped the pacing a bit.

Joel’s death:

potentially an unpopular opinion? but i actually like how Joel died. or uh lemme rephrase, i like the way they wrote his death. in this world of violence, hate, and brutality (actually doesn’t sound too off from our world but ahem moving on), i think the way he died was realistic, especially since he doomed all of humanity by saving Ellie in Part I. it just makes a lot of sense that someone would go after him and hunt him down

from the moment Abby and Owen stood over Jackson from the cliff, i was thinking: well theyre gonna kill Joel and since we’re gonna probably be playing as this girl for some (emphasis on some) of the game, they’re gonna go hard on the grey area of perspective in terms of revenge. which i was super on board with, but we’ll get back to that

when this game was first advertised, i didn’t know how i felt about a revenge story. it’s been told so many times and i’m never as hell-bent on revenge as much as the character is because it never feels warranted enough. that is, until i saw Joel die. watching Ellie pinned to the floor with a perfect view of his body, his face, beat to shit as she screams and begs for Abby to stop? haha that’s fucked Naughty Dog, thanks. but i do appreciate that they were able to make me just as mad as Ellie because of just how brutal his death was and how much i care, cared, about that character. no story has ever made me so incredibly enraged to the point i was with the main character full-stop to just destroy the perpetrator and take revenge. that’s why i think the way Joel dies is perfectly done. the fact that that cutscene is so horrible to watch for so many reasons just proves that it does it’s job.

Ellie’s half:

i actually don’t have too much to say about Ellie’s half of the story. this was what i both expected and wanted from the game, the whole game. while i can’t say i was having “fun”, because this isn’t really a fun game to play, you know what i mean when i say that this part was fun to play and follow.

side note: Naughty Dog’s improvement of your NPC buddy is so good, Dina and Jesse were both actually helpful, still not perfect, but also they’re not supposed to do all the work for you. i think the added layer that they could also get caught/seen and alert the enemy was completely unexpected and such a good addition to the gameplay (ofc this goes for Lev as well).

throughout the whole story, there’s kinda a problem with the pacing, and i know i’m not the first person to say that. however, i think the only big pacing issue i had with Ellie’s perspective was that kinda weird attempt of an open world map that they did with the gates. it felt a little unnecessary since i, and most other people, are playing for the story, not an open world with various side quest-like things. i missed the guitar cutscene with Ellie playing the guitar and singing to Dina (which kinda sucks, but i obviously just watched it after) because i just wanted to get back to the story rather than explore a large area. it was an attempt at something different so i won’t fault the game for that too much, but also stay in your lane lol so that section was a bit of a miss for me personally. i really liked the rest of it though, it had me engaged the whole time

Abby’s half:

ok. i have a lot to say about this half of the game since this is where most the problems occur.

first, let me preface this by saying that i don’t hate Abby. as i said, from the very beginning i knew she was going to have a, not justifiable, but an understandable reason for murdering Joel and that the game was going to be about seeing two sides to the same story. except, at the same time, i came here for Ellie, so why am i playing as this heterosexual? im mostly kidding. but fr i didn’t need the entire half of the game trying to get me to sympathize with Abby. i really didn’t need the message to be so spelt out for me, i got it from the moment i realized she was going to kill a favorite character.

i think my main gripe with the way they told this story is the way they formatted it. this story has all the elements to be amazing, but the execution just lacked the...finesse? idk if that’s the right word.

rather than splitting up the game into two halves, they could/should have integrated Abby’s story into Ellie’s so that when we cut from Abby holding the gun at Ellie in the theater to suddenly Abby as a young girl, it won’t feel so jarring when we have to start all over again with the upgrades and the timeline.

i really liked how we switched between them in the very beginning so why couldn’t that have just continued? in a book with multiple povs, the author often switches back and forth between every or every few chapters. you never see a book that starts with one perspective, then at the climax you have to start all over again from the other. at least, i’ve never seen this in any books i’ve read and i’ve read a lot ngl

maybe they forced us to stick with Abby for so long because if we’re forced to play as her, then we’re forced to get invested into her story. while this makes sense, it also really degraded at my enthusiasm for the game. it took me so long to just give up on the idea that we would be going back to Ellie relatively soon and when i did actually realize that was what was happening i was really disappointed.

instead of separating their stories, i would’ve liked to have Abby maybe one step behind Ellie the whole time so that while we play we’re just anticipating when Abby will finally catch up and it builds to this whole thing. instead, when we actually got to the point where everything was supposed to go down, we’re hit with whiplash and back to the very beginning with tutorials?? like did they just expect us to forget how to play since we switched characters?

i’m thinking, after Ellie and Dina jump over the barbed wire that explodes and Ellie’s knocked out, we could have switched over to Abby waking up in the WLF stadium. after Abby sneaks out of the stadium and you have that interaction with Jordan where he mentions Leah at the tv station, then we go back to Ellie waking up and tied to the table and we see Ellie kill Jordan.

after this i think Abby should have met Lev and Yara way sooner because i barely even remember what happened before Abby was caught by the seraphites it was so boring. so she gets caught by the seraphites AFTER we meet them through Ellie being shot through the shoulder (i still want to get all the first impressions of new stuff with Ellie because then it still makes her feel like the main character) and we meet the siblings and blahblahblah.

as a follow up, after Ellie kills Nora, which by the way, Ellie’s facial expressions are just so good with the red light while she’s just beating Nora to death? wow that entire interaction was so well done. anyway, after Ellie kills Nora, and Ellie gets back to the theater and the scene ends with her and Dina hugging, then we would switch to that whole section with Abby and Lev traveling to the hospital to get the meds and it would be cool if on her way in, Nora helps Abby and then on her way out, we run into a door we have trouble opening so we push and when it opens, Nora’s beaten up body is right there.

you get the gist. Abby’s story was barely intertwined with Ellie’s until the very end where she finds Owen and Mel dead. she doesn’t know that literally everyone else, except Leah, is dead too. i feel like that would’ve made the impact of Abby and Ellie’s fight at the theater more effective. affective? whatever i’m not an english nerd

i also think we should have gotten the flashback with Abby’s dad a little later when we’re expected to understand her character a bit more.

overall, i’m not mad about getting Abby’s side of the story, but i am mad that the way it was told felt so disconnected from Ellie. we could still get that whole arc of Abby going to the island to get Lev, she can still get her own story apart from Ellie, but she needed to have more of a interaction with Ellie’s actions.

Abby vs. Ellie, Abby’s pov:

i absolutely hate this fight. i really hate the way it was written and the way it happened. i get that the game is trying to give us Abby’s perspective and to show that in her point of view, Ellie is the villain in this story.

except, AGAIN, i don’t need this spoon fed to me!!! i KNOW that the world isn’t black and white and that people’s perspectives are different, but also? i don’t really care. both characters have gone through shit and both have done shitty things. neither of them are innocent, no one in this world is innocent (hence why i really dislike Mel, but that’s not really relevant), so it really comes down to which character you value more. in my - and most other people’s - case, it’s Ellie. i know the whole point of this fight is to make the player uncomfortable, but i wasn’t just uncomfortable, it made me legitimately start to dislike this game (spoiler for the end of this stupid-long review: i don’t completely dislike it)

the game really emphasizes that this is Abby’s story as much as it is Ellie’s and i get that, but this fight did not need to happen the way it did and the game didn’t need to be even longer after this. a lot of people say that we played from Abby’s perspective because Ellie would have killed Abby and that would be that (and she did, by the way, i relished watching Ellie get her revenge because while i don’t hate Abby, it was still so satisfying even if that wasn’t how the game wanted me to play). however however however, Abby wouldn’t have showed mercy either. she was absolutely going to kill Ellie if Dina hadn’t intervened then she was going to kill Dina if Lev hadn’t intervened.

here’s how i wouldve wanted it to go: we go back to Ellie’s perspective once Abby has the gun pointed at Ellie in the lobby and during their fight, Ellie would get the upper hand because she has weapons and shit (let’s be honest, Ellie would not win in hand-to-hand combat with fully-healthy Abby, we saw that first hand). Lev would try to jump in, but then Dina would disarm him and prevent him from escaping her grasp. then eventually Ellie would have the barrel of the shotgun pointed at Abby’s face and she would hear Lev tell her to please stop don’t kill her and Ellie would listen because the same exact thing happened to her (we could get a short flashback or something for more emotions, idk). so instead of killing Abby, Ellie would knock her out and her and Dina would leave and Lev would run to Abby’s unconscious body. this would end that cycle of revenge and because Abby has something more important to her than revenge (Lev), they would move on.

the ending:

if the game went how i just imagined, we probably wouldn’t get an ending that’s as depressing and open ended as it is, but i’m sure Neil and his team could figure something out, such as Ellie still has to deal with PTSD and Tommy’s really pissed at them and Ellie still looses her two fingers. so we get that little domestic sequence and the PTSD flashback and Tommy coming with his eye missing and showing the map. he leaves and when Ellie is about to leave in the middle of the night, Dina convinces her this time to stay and the next day Ellie tries to play the guitar one last time before giving up since she doesn’t have her fingers (i still want that last heartbreaking flashback, that one fucked me up i love it) and she goes out to leave it somewhere in the woods with it all ending with her walking away from the guitar that Joel gave her to symbolize her letting him go. idk man something like that, still not that open ended, but i’m just talking out of my ass rn

anyway that’s not how it went so we’ll stick to reality.

an open ending isn’t supposed to be unsatisfying, because that’s what this ending was. Part I does an open ending perfectly as we still get closure even though we don’t know exactly how things go afterwards (until now obviously).

after playing from Abby’s perspective for so goddamn long, it was weird to play as Ellie again, even while it was also a relief, and that makes me really sad. in the end, i did feel bad for Abby when she was literally left to starve and “hang” (but again i didn’t need 15+ hours in order to feel basic sympathy).

from the way they wrote the story, i knew Ellie wasn’t going to let it go and she was going to leave Dina and JJ. it made sense and i don’t think it was out of character for her, but the fact they did that in the first place and that Abby was the one to let go first? Abby got her revenge, she killed Joel, but Ellie never got that closure so of course she was going to go after Abby.

in the very end, Ellie is left with no one and Abby still has Lev and a group of fireflies to run to. Ellie’s biggest fear was being alone as she said in the first game, but that’s exactly what she’s left with. yeah life is unfair and i do like that the consequences feel real in this story, but i don’t think Ellie deserved to be done so damn dirty while Abby is living her best life. sure all of Abby’s friends were murdered because of Ellie and Dina leaving is Ellie’s own fault and i don’t blame Dina, but i mean we have no idea what happens to Ellie after this, where she goes. it at least feels like she’s on the road to eventually being relatively okay, as okay as you can be in this world.

i can’t completely articulate how i feel about this ending, even after three days having finished playing. all i do know is that while it’s realistic how Ellie’s story ended, i would’ve liked for Abby to get the same treatment. for her to not actually find the fireflies through the radio and escape from the Rattlers only to have no where to go so that, just like Ellie, revenge cost her everything and we don’t know where she went after.

maybe because Abby’s story was pretty much wrapped up and Ellie’s wasn’t, they’re planning for a trilogy, but i guess we’ll see.

the tldr;

this game has all the elements it needed to be amazing overall imo, i just wish they were all utilized Better. the reason it’s so hard to figure out how i feel about this game is because it has so much potential that just never came through and i’m really jealous of all the people who were blown away by this story. it’s still a good game though, but a 7/10 seems too high and 6/10 seems to low. ig it’s a 6.5/10 for me.

thanks for reading if you made it this far

#tlou2 #tlouii #the last of us #the last of us part ii #the last of us part 2 #i just love ellie a lot #i dont think abby is better than ellie for letting go because everyones an asshole #im scared of them making a part three because they would end up killing ellie somehow #this game fucked me up and im sorry if you actually read all my rambling but i appreciate you #also joel is not a bad person he’s just traumatized from losing his daughter leave him ALONE he’s HUMAN #the last of us part ii spoilers #tlou2 spoilers

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hope-faith-love-abide · 5 years

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So I just finished Part One of the game so I’m much farther into the story now than when I did my first impressions and uhhhhhh I have a lot of thoughts because WHAT THE CRAP ASFSDLSDJAKJ

(MAJOR spoilers below the cut)

SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED AND A LOT OF IT I DIDN’T EXPECT WHAT THE H E C K

I expected Jeralt to die - I mean, the title of the chapter is The Cause of Sorrow and he keeps saying stuff like “It’s time I told you all this Very Important Backstory, but I gotta go somewhere so I’ll tell you when I get back”, which is a pretty classic trope. I definitely didn’t expect the WAY he was killed though (freaking Not Monica), and the scene was still absolutely heartbreaking, especially the fact that Byleth wasn’t able to stop it even with Divine Pulse, and then it’s apparently the first time in her whole life that she cried :(

I really liked Jeralt, so I’m still sad that he really is gone.

ALSO I’ve come to really like Seteth and Rhea (more thoughts on her in a sec), especially as I’ve gotten to know more about him and Flayn. And I definitely did NOT expect it to be revealed that Flayn is actually his daughter, not his sister. That was a genuine surprise for me. But it makes even more sense why he’s so protective of Flayn, and in hindsight it makes a lot of sense too, since Flayn would always talk about her mother, but Seteth never said anything his mother, so I suppose the hints were there.

With Rhea, I can’t decide if Byleth’s mother is her sister, so she’s our aunt, or MAYBE (since I don’t know Rhea’s actual age) Byleth’s mother was her daughter so she’s our grandmother?? IDK, she keeps hinting at and almost saying something, but then something interrupts her so she never finishes, and I can’t figure out what the reveal will be.

But an even more surprising reveal, she can TURN INTO A DRAGON???? WHOA DUDE. She wasn’t kidding when she said she’d be able to defend the monastery. I thought she was just going to do some really strong magic or something, and instead she turns into a DRAGON. WOW.

But back tracking to before Rhea has to turn into a dragon, finally understanding more about Sothis and Byleth’s connection is pretty cool, and it was cool to see them joining together in order to get out of the void. I knew Byleth’s hair was supposed to change at some point, so it was neat to find out how that happens. Though it was also sad too since it meant Sothis wouldn’t be around to talk to us anymore. I really liked her, so it made me sad whenever I’d explore the monastery but she wasn’t there to talk to or give us her random commentary on things anymore :(

But anyway, once that happened, and then Rhea was all like “ah yes, you have been blessed by the goddess, now you should go to the Holy Tomb for an important thing” I was still kinda suspicious of her and thought for sure she was going to like attack us or do something weird like “now as part of this ritual you must die” or something idk, but lemme tell you that is NOT WHAT HAPPENED AT ALL

So the Flame Emperor shows up (”with Imperial soldiers”, someone says) and I’m like “well, okay, I expected something like this too. Obviously there was going to be a battle of some kind”. The fact that imperial soldiers are with him is interesting, but I figure they’re either being controlled or maybe the Flame Emperor got more people on his side, y’know, whatever, no big deal, let’s fight.

So we do that and we attack the Flame Emperor and the mask gets knocked off and

IT’S EDELGARD????????

My boy Dimitri loses his mind (and so do I) and now he thinks Edelgard is responsible for the massacre of his family and friends four years ago, and then she DECLARES WAR on the Church of Seiros and everyone else since she’s secretly already become the Emperor of the Adrestian Empire and she wants to reunite Fodlan under her rule and now she’s going to attack the monastery and

*screaming*

This escalated so quickly and I genuinely wasn’t expecting this turn of events and I am so concerned about Dimitri because he’s completely losing it.

So the battle starts, and everything is going fine, but I guess I got a little risky with some of my tactics and Byleth gets killed, so I have to use a Divine Pulse to go back.

So I do that, but then another terrifying situation occurs. A bunch of enemies start ganging up on Felix. First Edelgard uses a gambit and everything explodes and is on fire, and it takes him down to 8 HP. And then someone else comes at him and I’m already like “well, crap, probably going to have to use another Divine Pulse” because I refuse to lose one of my units at this point.

But then the enemy attacks and Felix DODGES it and then kills the enemy. And I’m freaking out. And then ANOTHER enemy comes at him and he dodges AGAIN and ALSO KILLS them. And I’m screaming on the inside. And finally it gets back to my turn, and Felix takes damage from the fire and LIVES WITH ONE (1) HP.

Forget any doubt I had about Felix, this boy is a little punk but also an absolute star student, you get all the A+’s and golden star stickers in the world, I love you so much, Mr. MVP. And he was indeed officially the MVP of the battle after I had Byleth defeat Edelgard so I could get that battle to finally end.

And after all that that’s when we get the cutscene where Rhea turns into a dragon to save everyone, and then Byleth goes back to help her and gets knocked into a chasm???

And then we get the five year timeskip, which I did know about, and it seems I was partially right that Byleth would somehow be taken out of participating in the story during that time. I thought she’d be in a coma or something, but I guess falling into the void works too.

So I also had seen the designs of the house leaders after the five year time skip, but when we finally found Dimitri it still hurt me seeing him like that :( My poor baby has had it so rough :(

And that’s where I stopped but I’m so excited to get back into it because I really really want to know what’s happened to everyone else. AND because I’m having so much fun. This is the most fun I’ve had with a new game in awhile.

#brigette's rambles #fire emblem three houses

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