If you haven’t experienced the game to the end, this second of a 2-part article is filled with spoilers and I suggest you read it after. This article will also contain images from the game that may be unsuitable for children and individuals who are sensitive to blood and violence. You have been warned.
You can read the first part of this article here.
- TECHNICAL REVIEW
As a note before we begin, you should know that I did not play the game. This review is written after going through other reviews and Youtube playthroughs. I take great care to absorb and compile those materials so that my experience with the game differs as little as possible from those actually playing it. I admit this limits my experience concerning gameplay especially, which is why in this segment I will just skim through features and provide my opinion of them.
The Last of Us part 2 (TLoU2) was released for the soon-to-be-obsolete Playstation 4 on June 19th 2020 after some period of limited early access for the press and independent reviewers. The game immediately generated incredible buzz, for better or worse, but nevertheless went on to become the fastest-selling Playstation 4 exclusive of all time. The game will also release for the upcoming Playstation 5.
TLoU2 looks incredible; it is as real and beautiful as real and beautiful can get for 3D technology in 2020. The quality and amount of detail in character models, facial expressions, voiceover work, animations, and environment is the best yet in the industry. There are little details in the game that are ultimately unnecessary but appreciated, like the trail you leave crawling on a dusty floor, footprints in the snow, or Ellie’s habit of wiping her nose. If anything is still lacking in terms of technology, I would say minor issues still bother me with some hairs, water mechanics and clothing folds.
Besides graphics, the amount and quality of content are also more than double its predecessor, as this dystopian emotional roller-coaster ride is estimated to take an average of about 30 hours to complete. Every cutscene and gameplay segment that contains a story element take up around a third of that total duration, which is an absolute win for me.
Like its predecessor, TLoU2 is also a very linear game. There are no branching storylines or side quests or the like; players have no choice other than to stay alive, or die; even dying will trigger a game over, which will bring you back to the latest checkpoint or save… which ultimately means you have no choice but to stay alive and play through a single story. Which is fine, because that’s what we got with TLoU anyway; we are essentially playing an interactive story.
And that’s what TLoU2 is really about: A story that is told with your help. You’ll journey between unique expansive locales like Jackson, Seattle and Santa Barbara, scavenging for supplies, upgrading weapons, solving puzzles and fight enemies in the third-person using gameplay features similar to the ones in the first game, with the notable addition of branching skillsets, and the ability to jump and prone.
Combat in TLoU2 looks similar to the first game. Unlike Joel though, Ellie is sneaky and agile, but can also create quite the havoc when necessary. There are new weapons, and upgrades through workbenches are given a little face-lift, but they’re nothing to write home about. We do, however, get a feature to help us aim this time around. The Lock-on Aim will pull the reticle to the center of an enemy target’s body, and you can also activate Auto-target to automatically lock-on to the next enemy.
Enemies seem relatively smarter and act more natural, though not by much. Sometimes they will engage each other in banter and short conversation; and just like the first installment, you will not find the same conversation repeated anywhere else in the game.
A few new enemy types are introduced, like dogs, the shambler, and most notably The Rat King (a boss fight), but their effects and functions— though appreciated— are miniscule compared to the things we’ll have to go through in the rest of the game.
Every human NPC that Ellie and Abby could kill now have names (even the dogs), and their friends would call them out when something happened to them (missing or seeing them dead). Strangely though, sometimes an enemy far away would suddenly deviate from their patrol route and made a bee-line for the location of your latest stealth-kill, eventually discovering what happened.
There are a variety of puzzles to solve in the world and a wide range of methods to dispatch enemies that would satisfy all types of players. For the most part, you will rarely feel like the game is trying to stop you from moving forward, just so you know that there are some logical and strategic thinking required. However, with the length of the game being what it is, combat and exploration will start to feel repetitive at some point.
Players will also be rewarded for thorough exploration, as there are plenty of items to collect and plenty of easter eggs to discover, some of which add more weight to the story (like spots to play guitar and access to additional scenes).
Once again the game features companions. In many parts of the game, an AI character or two will tag along in our adventure. They join or leave depending on where we are in the story; so their presence is not a choice we can make. In terms of AI, companions still have the same positives and negatives as the first game. They follow you around, converse, and play the support in combat. If cornered and you didn’t come to their aid for too long, they can die. An old annoyance is also still present: companions can literally ‘hide’ in plain sight of the enemy but ignored unless you start combat; this doesn’t happen often and when it does they’ll quickly scurry out of the way and hide properly… but it’s still pretty irritating to experience.***
- STORY REVIEW
While technological improvements are obvious and worthy of praise, the story of TLoU2— though still as emotional and engaging as the first one— garnered a lot of controversy from fans, a great deal complaining about Naughty Dog’s treatment of Joel’s death and the way the game treated Abby, the main ‘villain’ of the story, presented here with quotes because she’s obviously far more complex than that.
The mood of the game itself has also shifted towards the darker side. The first act ends in Jackson with Abby’s revenge fulfilled, and the next pushed forward to Seattle (and later Santa Barbara) with an even bigger, more relentless kind of revenge. Because unlike Abby whose vengeance starts and stops at Joel, Ellie doesn’t spare the collateral; she will kill everyone to get to Abby.
And it is brutal tale.
Ellie in TLoU2 is a lost, tormented soul, and throughout our time with her we were not given any promise that some kind of intervention— divine or otherwise— would come to guide her back to the light. And unfortunately for me, many fans don’t share my view and rage on the game they’ve been expecting for 7 years. This is actually the reason I wrote this review. But more on this later.
You have to understand that Joel and Ellie are fictional characters that are quite dear in my heart. The first game was a generation-defining production, after all. So in TLoU2, each time I see Ellie go through the Salt Lake crew one by one, even plowed through Seraphite cultists and slave traders that were just ‘in her way’, I get more and more sad. I started to pity Ellie more and more and wished she would stop. When she cornered Nora (the red-tinted picture below) and began to rage, I actually hoped she would turn around and walk away. But she didn’t.
I admit I cared. I don’t want to see Ellie like this. Joel was skilled and brutal but he was never vengeful; he always did what he did to protect and survive; Joel never had intentional malice toward others. I want Ellie to see that and followed in his footsteps, because it would honor his memory. I want her to go home with Dina, Jesse and Tommy… and start living her life again.
And in instances like this, the game rewards my empathy. ‘Making Nora talk’ had shaken Ellie pretty bad, and she began to show remorse. Later, we get to a tipping point at the aquarium, when Ellie killed Mel and found out she’s pregnant. I rather believe Ellie would have killed herself then and there had Tommy and Jesse not come for her.
After that night in the aquarium, Ellie is destroyed, and she was actually ready to go home… before Abby came, killed Jesse, maimed Tommy, subdued Dina, beat 350 kinds of shit out of Ellie, and told her to get lost.
I figured it must’ve been a moment of emotional stroke for Ellie, being ‘pitied’ by Joel’s murderer a second time. Somehow Abby had been one step ahead of her the whole time, and Ellie was not equipped to understand why it’s happening… Ellie was completely defeated but let live, and yet Joel is still dead and it’s all Abby’s fault and Ellie must make her pay; what else could she do about all the rage, guilt and shame she’s feeling?
At that moment a deep and silent obsession for Abby, one stronger than before, must’ve begun bubbling up in her, as she went home and started a life with Dina and her future baby.
The raw horribleness of Ellie’s journey is fortunately not constant, as we are sometimes treated with happy scenes like the heartwarming flashbacks or melancholic guitar-playing (they’re really good). We were even made hopeful when we see Ellie lead a comfortable farm life with her girlfriend and an adoptive baby son. Sadly that didn’t last long thanks to Ellie’s persistent and debilitating guilt for Joel’s death that forced her to return to a path of vengeance.
And yet, once again, the game had my back. Ellie found Abby in Santa Barbara, fought her again, almost killed her, but ended up not going through with it.
Ellie stayed the Ellie I wanted. I was extremely proud (also emotionally exhausted) when she let Abby go.
I also hoped Abby and Lev died at sea.***
- THE GREAT CONTROVERSY
When the first game was released, TLoU was considered a masterpiece in almost every aspect of video game production. Everyone who played or watched it, loved it, and it received countless awards and praise for its deep exploration (and understanding) of our capacity to love and survive against all odds.
Sometimes we didn’t even realize that TLoU was basically a ‘zombie game’, though on an artistic scale, it is not a video game, it is an experience, and The Last of Us continued to define its generation to this day.
However, when part 2 came out, well… “confusion” is the nicest word I can think of to describe a lot of fans’ reactions to the story.
Nobody minded the technological advancements. Nobody minded the gameplay. But a lot minded how Joel died, and a lot more minded Abby. They didn’t mind her name, or her looks. They just minded… Abby. Fans also object the fact Ellie spared Abby’s life in the end.
I will try to explain these problems as best as I can.
THE JOEL PROBLEM
Fans don’t hate that Joel died in TLoU2, in fact we kinda already expected it when we learned that Ellie was gonna be the star of the game, and that she would be going on a rampage.
No. Fans hate why Joel died; he said his name to a bunch of strangers, got shot in the knee and then repeatedly hit on the head with a golf club until he died. He didn’t even get to defend himself. He didn’t get to be the badass that we knew. He died shitty and meaningless like some random NPC pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto V.
And he didn’t say goodbye to Ellie even though she’s there (later we found out he did, in a way, the night before— more on this later).
Context: Joel saved a lone stranger named Abby from a horde of infected, and in the chaos that ensued he and Tommy accepted Abby’s suggestion to find shelter ‘at her friends’ nearby’.
They made it. Then, Joel and Tommy came into a roomful of strangers, found out they are outsiders, and then proceeded to introduce themselves. This simple gesture alerted the strangers that they had found their objective. The rest is history.
Oh by the way, Joel and Tommy had spent 20 years since the outbreak doing shady stuff to survive, and this all happened even before Joel met Ellie; both Joel and Tommy were veterans in survival, at one point Joel even managed to kill ELEVEN infected with a 6-round pistol while hanging upside down. Joel is a certified badass.
…and then he get cozy standing in the middle of a roomful of outsiders and introduce himself… like a grandma offering a home invader some cookies from her kitchen, thinking he was Santa Claus.
THE ABBY PROBLEM
Oh, man, where to begin with Abby?
Fans hate her. They hate that she killed Joel. They hate that they had to play the woman who killed Joel for what felt like an eternity; they hate that the game forced this on them so that maybe what she did wouldn’t seem so bad anymore.
They hate that Yara and Lev were obviously tools to humanize Abby and give us emotional conflict in time for the final showdown that’s obvious to come.
When the final showdown did arrive, they hate that even though they get to play as Ellie, they’re not fighting Abby at her prime; she’s all weak and ugly and pathetic, and Lev was there too for us to feel sorry for.
And they hate that the game went on to make Ellie look like the villain.
Also, Abby is just an asshole in relationships. Man, what a fucker.
People really want Abby dead. People want her dead so bad that Youtube gamers posted “Abby fails”, showing her getting killed repeatedly and in various ways when we play her. They do this with Ellie too, but the number is staggeringly small in comparison.
THE FINALÉ PROBLEM
Ultimately, many fans object to the fact that Abby did not die by Ellie’s hands at the beach. Many believe Ellie had lost too much and come too far to not go through with it. That can be hard to wrap your head around, I admit.
Fans are also confused about the empty farmhouse Ellie returned to, why she left it again, why it’s even necessary to go back there, and what it all means. Fans believe the game is being too cruel to Ellie, like she’s lost everything and didn’t get the justice she deserved. It’s an even harder notion to wrap our heads around, especially if we’ve experienced the first game and inevitably fell in love with Joel and Ellie.***
- DECONSTRUCTING THE STORY
This review was written to get to this point, with the purpose of sharing my personal take on the controversial issues surrounding TLoU2’s story, and hopefully shed a fresh perspective over the whole thing and maybe even start an interesting discussion.
Let’s begin:
WHY JOEL DIED
I agree with the popular concensus that a veteran survivor like Joel wouldn’t let himself end up in a room full of strangers, standing in the middle, setting himself up to get outnumbered, outgunned, and obviously surrounded.
The notion of a large number of outsiders entering his territory should have been enough for Joel to want to leave that situation right away.
He was being uncharacteristically reckless and there’s no excuse for that.
HOW JOEL DIED
I don’t like the way Joel died, being kneecapped and clubbed to death without getting a single fight in.
Funny thing is, I wouldn’t like it either if he went out with guns blazing; he would still have to die. A character that I love would still be dead. It’s been clear and rightly-assumed by fans for some time that he would die; it’s the right kind of incentive to warrant the level of intensity shown by Ellie in the trailers and gameplay showcases. It’s needed to set Ellie off on her quest to stab tons of people in the neck for revenge.
Someone on the internet said Joel’s death is “shitty and meaningless”. Sure, maybe. But by that the game was keeping itself in check: remember that the game is trying to simulate realism as much as possible, and in the real world, people die all the time and often never in the way you hoped or expected.
WHY ARE WE PLAYING ABBY?
It’s simple. We need to dive into Abby’s perspective and experiences to give the inevitable final confrontation with Ellie emotional weight. Everyone is a hero in their own story, and by switching to Abby, we were expected to equalize ourselves and see the story unfold on a larger scale, hopefully seeing that there are no heroes or villains in it; only people.
The real question— I think— that fans meant to ask is: why are we playing Abby so much?
The answer to that is we shouldn’t have. I think it’s a forceful method from the developer’s side to get us to sympathize for Abby, and there should (must) have been another, more efficient way to get that point across. It’s not just because fans who love Ellie and Joel would feel uncomfortable playing Abby, but also because after some amount of time playing, all the scavenging, exploring and killing would have overstayed their welcome and feel repetitive. And they do.
I get that we’re supposed to see how grey and relative everything is. “One’s hero is another’s villain” and all that applied here. We’re also supposed to see that the person who killed Joel is no longer the same person Ellie confronted on the beach; Abby’s already a different person in the theater, even.
What the developer didn’t count on was how much we hate Abby because of what she initially did, which was killing Joel. She killed one of the most beloved video game characters of this generation, and then they expect us to play her? For that long?
Oh yes. Abby is hated for purely sentimental reasons, and I believe that’s significant.
To add insult to the injury, players are expected to control Abby in battling Ellie as the final boss, practically antagonizing her in the minds of players. I completely realize that that was not the developer’s intention, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
The way we’re made to play Abby is not ‘perspective’. It’s not equalizing points of view. It’s just torture, man. But I also completely understand why Naughty Dog wants us to play her. It doesn’t have to be as long as it is, but I still understand.
LEV
The evolution of Abby’s character involves young Lev, a young former Scar who were persecuted by his own people because he was a transgender. Even his own mother hated him and he was forced to kill her for it.
As a plot device in TLoU2, Lev was meant to mirror Ellie’s early life with Joel: a teenager repeatedly left behind before coming into the care of one he could finally depend on: Abby, which mirror Joel: whom Ellie depended on. It’s all parallels.
Abby was reluctant to take in Lev, but circumstances brought them together and she slowly warmed up to him and cared for him, so much that she was willing to abandon her old life and find a new one together.
In the final confrontation at the beach, Lev’s silent (and unconscious) presence plays a subtle but important role for both Ellie and Abby. Because of him, Abby refused to fight Ellie; she needed to survive to take care of Lev. Meanwhile, Lev is also the subliminal leverage that allows Ellie to forego her vengeance. In the short time that she saw Lev, Ellie understood many things about Abby. Many things were also rushing through Ellie’s mind as she was choking and drowning Abby, one of them being the realization that if Abby died, Lev would die too.
THE MANY THINGS RUSHING THROUGH ELLIE’S MIND AS SHE WAS CHOKING AND DROWNING ABBY
This segment is of course 100% speculative on my part, but dissect the game enough and you’ll find there are enough clues for me to come to these observations.
The main question we want answered with this segment is “why did Ellie spare Abby?”. Well, one thing’s for sure: Ellie did not spare Abby because Abby spared hers the last time.
So: “why did Ellie spare Abby?”
First, Ellie didn’t want Lev to die too.
Second, Seattle had shaken Ellie, and although the lack of closure had led her to this moment on the beach, she’s already exhausted.
Third, Ellie saw Joel’s dying face just before she challenged Abby. She initially took this as a ‘request’ for revenge, but later realized it’s a ‘plea’ to let go. By not letting go, by fighting Abby, Ellie slid further and further away from the memory of Joel, and it’s crushing her inside.
Fourth, she realized she’s not fighting Abby anymore, but herself. It’s subtle, metaphorical, and probably not true, but as she was drowning Abby, Ellie looked through the water at Abby’s dying face and saw a distorted reflection of her own bloody and tortured self. The failure to recognize what she’d become terrified her.
Fifth, Ellie didn’t want to dishonor Joel’s legacy. In the first game, Joel said that he had survived for so long because he was always finding something to fight for, and he wanted Ellie to find that as well. Ellie was fighting now but realized just in time that it was the wrong fight. When she set off for Seattle she already had a good idea why Abby had killed Joel, but she went anyway; she had only realized now that her quest for revenge is not a purpose, it’s a coping mechanism.
Sixth and last, her circumstances now is different from Seattle. She had a family now; she’s taking care of Dina and JJ and that is important. She had a home and a future with them. If she had killed Abby, even if Lev eventually died along with her, the cycle of hatred would somehow someday find its way back to Ellie, which by extension find Dina and JJ as well. By sparing Abby, Ellie is protecting her family from retribution. Her family is what she’s supposed to be fighting for. So she stopped.
THE EMPTY FARMHOUSE
This segment is my chance to elaborate on the sixth answer above, which tackles the issue of why Ellie came back to the farmhouse even though Dina had said she and JJ would leave if Ellie went off looking for Abby again… which Dina did. She left. The house was empty.
Imagine this:
Imagine Ellie had killed Abby, and without her, Lev soon died as well. There would be no one left to avenge Abby’s death. There would be no one left to avenge what happened in Salt Lake City. Ellie’s revenge would be complete.
But that revenge would be the circumstance that defines the rest of Ellie’s life. She would be lost forever; lost to her family, lost to Joel’s legacy, dishonored his memory, disappointed herself and disappointed everyone who ever cared for her and fought for her.
She ‘came back’ from Seattle, but she won’t be able to come back from that.
Joel asking her to always find something to fight for is actually another way of saying one should always find one’s meaning in life… that’s what Ellie held on to and always wanted with her life even before she met Joel.
Long ago, Joel was lost too, before he found his meaning in caring for Ellie. Ellie found her meaning in supporting the Firefly’s cause. When that didn’t work out, look at how quiet and reserved she had become, and how strained her relationship with Joel was. Ellie was safe and alive… but without meaning, she’s not living.
And then she found Dina, after which events transpired one after the other, which finally led to…
THE GUITAR BY THE WINDOW
As Ellie entered her abandoned home, she found her belongings left in a room, and tried to play her guitar. Joel had taught her to play and even gifted her the guitar at the start of her lesson. It’s a significant part of her life growing up with Joel. It’s a treasured memory of their time together.
In this moment we get a final flashback that took place the night before the fateful patrol. Ellie had come to Joel, taking the initiative to patch things up between them even though it was Joel who betrayed her. It was a great moment; one that I really cherished, because it tells me that they had had some kind of goodbye, and a good one too. I assume this moment was also a significant motivator behind Ellie’s blind persistence to avenge her surrogate father.
Because that night, they’re ‘together’ again. After years of being estranged from the only person she trusts, things were finally beginning to look up… and then it was all taken away from her the very next day.
After some small-talk, Ellie let loose her disappointment in Joel, and yet the man still defended his decision to save her from the Firefly all those years ago, even claiming he would do it all over again if he was given the chance (which to me is Joel-speak for “I love you”).
Joel’s statement shocked Ellie, and surprisingly, she wasn’t mad at his honesty, even seemed content and… flattered. She may never forgive him for what he did, but she’s still… not mad anymore now… probably because she missed him.
So she told him she’s willing to try to forgive him, and it overwhelmed Joel with his version of happiness.
That night, they parted on good terms. It was a beautiful scene.
Back to present day: Ellie couldn’t play the guitar. With two missing fingers, how could she?
For me, this is symbolic punishment. By pursuing revenge, something precious was taken from her as ‘payment’; in this case her ability to play the guitar, something the best man in her life had taught her. By pursuing revenge, even though she didn’t go through with it, she still had to pay and lost a valuable part of her life with Joel.
But look at her. She had changed so much that she seemed okay with it, even kind of expecting it. She expected things to get harder for her now, but she would keep on living because she didn’t want to disappoint Joel any longer.
So she set the guitar down by the window, left the room, and soon after we saw her outside that window, walking away, as if to say:
5. THINGS LEFT TO SAY: A CONCLUSION
There are fans out there who wished they were given the chance to ‘get justice’ by way of giving the game multiple endings. To them, I will leave this question:
If you want The Last of Us part 2 to have multiple endings, did you wish Joel was given a choice to let Ellie die in the first game as well?
I don’t like Abby too, but I understand that Naughty Dog is trying to tell us something very important with their treatment of the game, and I suggest we listen instead of raging over what we thought was ‘a ruined game‘.
The Last of Us part 2 is gargantuan in its ambition to lay bare the human condition, unfiltered. As someone who adores story-driven games, the raw and emotionally-draining experience it offers is difficult to describe because it hits hard and it hits deep without compromise. With that in mind, I give the game a score of 9 out of 10, and highly recommend you to play it, if you can.
6. BONUS – FAVORITES FROM THE LAST OF US part 2
This final segment was very easy to write. Overall I love every moment with Joel and Ellie together, even Joel’s final moments. They are simply a great combination of characters and their journey together— for me— will always be legendary and a historic achievement in storytelling.
Now let’s get into more specific favorites without any particular order:
- Visual detail: facial expressions
- Gameplay detail: every time Ellie found a superhero card
- Combat detail: At the end of Ellie’s stealh-kills, she flicks her knife outward to rip her victim’s neck. It’s horrible but also looks really cool. This detail is gone after the skill is upgraded.
- Ellie detail: her character designs, all versions
- Jackson Settlement: beginning of the game – the environment Ellie walked through on her way to starting patrol
- Jackson Settlement: Ellie pets a dog
- Jackson Settlement: the stable and the horses
- Jackson villa: Ellie’s cry as Abby kills Joel (it’s haunting)
- Jackson Settlement: Ellie lingers at Joel’s grave
- Jackson Settlement: The entire sequence of Ellie exploring Joel’s house
- Seattle: Ellie was captured and we try to cut her loose as one of Abby’s friends was about to kill Dina in the background
- Wyoming Museum: Joel and Ellie pushed each other into the river
- Wyoming Museum: when we find out Ellie could swim
- Wyoming Museum: Ellie guessing her birthday surprise
- Wyoming Museum: Ellie climbing on to the T-rex statue and jumped
- Wyoming Museum: “Oh hello, sorry, the dinosaurs are busy right now”
- Wyoming Museum: putting hats on dinosaurs
- Wyoming Museum: the entire space capsule scene
- Wyoming Museum: Joel’s Solar System rhyme
- Wyoming Museum: Joel told Ellie that Sarah loved museums too, and Ellie didn’t say anything to respond
- Saint Mary’s Hospital: Ellie forced the truth out of Joel
- Seattle: Ellie cracked her mask and Dina found out she’s immune
- WLF medical facility: Ellie confronted a dying Nora
- Theater: Ellie’s shock at killing Nora
- Aquarium: Mel telling Abby she’s a piece of shit
- Seattle: Ellie exploring a rainy Seattle on a boat
- Aquarium: Ellie finds out Mel is pregnant
- Seattle: Every guitar mini-game and song
- Theater: How afraid Ellie is by Abby’s threats to kill Tommy
- Theater: top-down shot of an unconscious Dina and a defeated Ellie
- Farmhouse: the entire sequence with Dina, JJ, and later, Tommy
- Santa Barbara: Ellie’s ‘reunion’ with slave Abby
- Santa Barbara: Ellie’s slow walk to follow Abby to the shore
- Santa Barbara: Ellie crying while drowning Abby
- Santa Barbara: Ellie let Abby go and was left alone in the water
- Farmhouse ending: The entire sequence
- Farmhouse ending: Ellie’s flashback on her final night with Joel***
Hey, guys, thanks for reading through till the end. I really appreciate it. I would also greatly appreciate any kind of participation from you, be it a like, a share, or dropping your own thoughts about this game in the comments. Just a little request: let’s keep things cool, yeah?
Thanks again. Cheers.
Candlelight Sinner 
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