The Last of Us 2: Remember that time Lowtax posted ITT? [Spoiler Chat]

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The Last of Us 2: Remember that time Lowtax posted ITT? [Spoiler Chat]

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

lol I looked up the book Abby is reading at the start of her segment and OF COURSE its by the loving Game of Thrones dipshit writer

# ¿ Jun 30, 2020 04:52

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 01:28

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

anyways just finished this game

expertly crafted with a huge budget, clearly worked on by a lot of talented people; I enjoyed many parts of it

but I loved the first game specifically because of its ambiguous ending and this one is loving hellbent on rehashing that poo poo and making sure not an ounce of ambiguity remains and boy does that suck

# ¿ Jun 30, 2020 05:01

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Necrothatcher posted:

But okay, I'll give you the Rattlers.

when you play The Last of Us Part 3 as Little Jimmy Rattler and learn the their secret reasons for enslavement you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 15:16

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

morality ranking:

abby >> joel > ellie

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 15:41

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Indecisive posted:

When does abby do anything bad anyway? She killed Joel so loving what it wasn't without cause.. she killed scars? Literally that's her JOB buddy. And they are trying to kill her also if you weren't paying attention. So what are these supposed "war crimes"? Someone mentioned traps? When do we see that?

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 16:43

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

smoobles posted:

I think you have to suspend your disbelief because video games, to a degree... Think about the Uncharted games where Drake murders far more people with far less cause than Joel.

There's no such thing as a blockbuster AAA video game that doesn't involve shooting people with guns, so I feel like you have to keep realistic expectations within that genre.

actually you can be critical of a genre

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 17:43

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

a new study bible! posted:

Idk maybe it's coincidental that Abby learns that scars are also human after loving Owen and learning that he and Mel will be leaving Seattle and she can't come.

weird that you think the WLF are bad but continue to use their dehumanizing slurs

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 17:45

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

veni veni veni posted:

Lol at the absolute empathy people here expect for a group of creepy cultists that go around pulling the intestines out of any outsider they run into.

Also arguing whether or not it's ok to call them scars is peak internet.

hell yeah the sarcasm understander has joined the thread

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 21:22

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

It's not just "they kill too many bad guys" it's that the central themes this game seems to be trying to convey is "there aren't heroes and villains, people have reasons for doing what they do, its a hosed up world and everyone is trying to survive" and the game spends a lot of time humanizing and making you feel bad about killing a bunch of people, but only specific ones. The actual text of the game says "there ARE villains, and there ARE groups of people you can mass murder and not feel bad about, Abby just wasn't really one of them"

Fallen Hamprince posted:

The 'they kill to many henchmen' thing feels a lot like watching a musical and complaining about how it doesn't make sense that all these chimney sweeps can sing and dance like trained professionals. Plus in most cases you don't have to kill anyone; it's entirely possible to sneak through and that's probably the most story-consistent way to play the game considering Ellie isn't a space marine and couldn't plausibly take down whole squads of enemies over and over again.

When I got to the scar island I spent the entire time expecting Yara to express maybe a little apprehension at bringing a wolf along to indiscriminately kill the only people she has ever known. Every time I cleared an area out so I could collect all the scrap to make my guns shoot better I kept wanting Yara to at least be like "hey, we just need to get Lev and get out, you don't have to kill everyone." Or maybe there would be a confrontation with someone that she grew up with and really didn't want to have to fight. Or maybe I'd shoot someone who deserved it but I turn around and there is a terrified woman cowering in the corner with her child. Instead, all of the noncombatants are comedically whisked offscreen as soon as you arrive as if the writers are giving you their blessing to kill everyone you see

And then the rattlers, just lmao

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 15:57

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

she gets back and remembers that she forgot to kill Abby and heads back out once more

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 19:23

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

the Jackson homophobe existed to set up misdirection about why there was tension between Ellie and Joel at the beginning of the game

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 22:19

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Stormgale posted:

Sure but why does he need to be a Homophobe?

right, I meant to imply its bad because it doesn't serve any purpose other than as a means to set up some unrelated narrative suspense

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 22:43

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

the critics who have been more negative toward the game are largely at places that have stopped giving numbered scores, which means that metacritic ratings are increasingly skewed toward outlets that review games on more traditional and rudimentary criteria which frankly Naughty Dog is still fuckin excellent at

also important to reiterate that you can like a game and also be critical of it. I enjoyed the game a lot for the most part even if I have some major issues with large parts of the story

I will defer to some excerpts from Rob Zacny who is a much better writer than me:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxqnxy/last-of-us-part-2-review

quote:

It doesn�t take long to make crystal clear that our heroes� revenge stories are making them the villains in other people�s narratives. Even before it begins trying to humanize the people you are busy killing, The Last of Us 2 is a game of squalid cruelty. It�s not just the fact that you torture and kill people even as they plead with you to spare them, or the incredibly detailed destruction of faces and bodies that happens with shocking regularity throughout this game. It is also the growing lack of justification. Nobody ever reconsiders their quest for vengeance. Everyone acts under a kind of vindictive compulsion that goes little remarked and unexamined.

Anger and grief are understandable motivations at the start of a revenge quest, but The Last of Us 2 never follows-through on the work of exploring what sustains them past reason and scruple. That�s why it falls short of its ambitions of being a work of tragedy, despite roundly excellent performances by the cast. The characters� motivations are easy enough to understand, but they�re also increasingly less compelling as the game drags on and the losses mount.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxjxx/problems-with-last-of-us-part-2-ending

quote:

When we see the full scene, we learn Ellie visited Joel the night before he died and admitted that she would never be able to forgive Joel for the choice he made to �rescue� her from the Fireflies� but that she�d like to work on moving past it, and see if their relationship could be repaired.

It�s the second critical flashback we�ve received about Joel and Ellie, and each one�far from shedding light on Ellie�s decisions�makes Ellie�s choice less convincing. They are structured like explanatory reveals but each one cuts against the actions we observe throughout the game.

One of the sources of narrative suspense early in the game is whether or not Ellie knew what Joel had done at the end of the first game. It�s pretty obvious from the start of the game that she did, and that it was the reason other characters were picking up on tension between her and Joel. But it�s made explicit through flashbacks of happier times, where we see how Ellie�s nagging doubts about Joel�s version of events eventually lead to a confrontation at the old Firefly base where she forces Joel to admit the truth about his decision to kill the Fireflies and �save� her. It opened a huge rift in their relationship.

Which means, from the start of this game, Ellie not only knew why a bunch of assassins had shown up to kill Joel, but she also knew that Joel had it coming. She knew that Joel�s death, while awful and painful to witness, was something approaching justice� and yet she led all her friends to assist her in a mass reprisal-killing. It�s a source of discomfort the game never explores. With the exception of a couple conversations where she�s evasive with Dina and Jessie, she�s never forced to weigh what she knows about Joel against the things she�s doing to avenge him.

quote:

It is remarkable how quickly this part of the story unfolds given the leisurely pacing of other parts of The Last of Us Part 2. Dina goes from �come back to bed� to �I won't go through this again� in seconds. This was a trick employed in the first game as well: Joel had no time to come to terms with the Fireflies� sacrifice of Ellie. She was under the knife, and he had minutes to react. So all the things that would make sense of people to do in that situation, there was no time to consider. Joel�s decision was �Fatherhood or the World� and the rest of the game was a murderous sprint.

But the trick doesn�t work well here because the characters and the relationship we've seen to this point makes the scene ring false. Dina, who has been established throughout the story as a survivor of things as bad or worse than Ellie has seen, has no role to play here other than the �spurned wife�. The conversation where they try and work through what�s going on with Ellie? It doesn�t happen. Instead the only tacks Dina appears to take with Ellie are, �You have an obligation to this family� and �Hey, have you considered how hard it is for me to deal with you?� Unsurprisingly, Ellie walks out. It�s a disservice to both characters and it compounds the problem of motivation that undercuts every part of Ellie�s story.

quote:

Ellie was sad and angry for reasons that were sympathetic in the immediate aftermath of the trauma of Joel�s death, but by the time she�s trying to drown Abby in the Pacific, she�s spent half the game shambling toward a bleak fate that could have been avoided with a modicum of introspection or awareness. Why Ellie was incapable of that, why it took losing everything for her to see past her despair at witnessing Joel�s death, why she was willing to choose evil rather than acceptance, might have made for an interesting character study. But The Last of Us Part 2 instead serves up a restatement of its basic premise as an endgame revelation. At the start we suspect that she�s furious at the death of a beloved father figure with whom she had a difficult relationship and by the end we�re sure of it.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2020 01:50

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Fallen Hamprince posted:

All of these criticisms ring incredibly hollow and come across to me as a nerd culture writer complaining that the characters don't act with the august detachment and rationalism that he surely would be capable of were he in their place.

That's not what any of these criticisms are saying at all; he's not arguing that characters should or shouldn't have done what they did but rather than there are a lot of complex and interesting implications, questions, and dynamics that the game spends little or no time exploring. It's a very long game for what it is and most of Ellie's story is spent repeating the same few notes over and over.

quote:

This paragraph in particular is written like someone trying to understand grief at a person's death as a function of a video game karma scale in which Ellie should feel no grief, because her anger at her for saving him should cancel out any emotional attachment she has to him. But emotional reality is precisely the opposite; having unresolved tensions with a loved one makes losing them more painful, not less. The rift in Ellie and Joel's relationship is not a mitigating factor, it is the central driving factor in her actions throughout the game. After Joel's death, all of Ellie's anger at Joel and associated survivor guilt are displaced onto a perceived need for revenge; when Ellie finally confronts these feelings that need evaporates.

Again, he's not saying Ellie should have realized that Joel was a Bad Person and moved on, but that it should be a complicating layer both to her grief and to her relationships with the people that are following her. Surely Dina would have wanted to know why Abby did it. How do you think she would feel about their revenge plot if Ellie told her the truth? Would Ellie lie?

I think your read here is very good but I also feel the way the game handles it fell flat for a couple of reasons:

1) Anyone who played the first game knows what Joel did and why he was killed. Ellie knows as well, but in an effort to create suspense the game withholds this information. The game uses the rift between Ellie and Joel as a big story reveal 3/4 of the way through Ellie's section of the game rather than as a primary motivating factor throughout. Instead of a deep dive into her internal struggle during the journey you spend a dozen grueling hours murdering people and wondering what is keeping the white hot flame of Ellie's rage burning unwavering and when you're finally given the answer I frankly didn't feel like it was enough.

2) Ellie and Joel didn't get the chance to repair their relationship but they did get the chance to say what they needed to say. It seems like the writers decided at the last moment that they didn't want Ellie and Joel's relationship to end on a sour note, and it significantly undermines the unresolved tension that was supposed to be driving her grief.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2020 05:20

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Perfectly Safe posted:

I don't disagree so much with this analysis for the earlier part of the game, but I'm comfortable that what Ellie does makes sense. People point to the fact that Ellie, as it is revealed, knows what Joel did, and so she should understand that people would have a legitimate grievance against him and yet drags Dina off on a revenge quest anyway. But I think this is the point - Ellie does know what Joel did, she knows that he chose Ellie over, effectively, the world. If someone had a legitimate grievance against Ellie, came after her, and killed her, would Joel give a single poo poo about how justified they were? He would not. He would burn the world down to make them pay. So the criticism that she lacks introspection and awareness is not wrong - she has not thought things through - but it's not just Ellie being as stupid and unthinking as the plot requires. She's trying to be Joel. She spends the whole game trying to be Joel. And at least part of her revelation at the end of the game is that she isn't, doesn't have to be, and that he wouldn't want her to be.

I think this is a really good take, especially given Ellie's reaction in the final flashback when Joel says he would have done it again

god now I'm thinking about the parallels and implications if, instead of the dumb rattlers, Ellie finally catches up with Abby and she's with the Fireflies

# ¿ Jul 3, 2020 06:20

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

ripped Abby rules

# ¿ Jul 3, 2020 17:46

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Dewgy posted:

This game I�m not playing myself and fast forwarding through really has some glaring pacing issues for some reason.

ah, just watch a speedrunner then

# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 18:19

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

there should be a broad range of reviews with different goals and perspectives, imo

# ¿ Jul 8, 2020 16:28

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

why would joel think he was in any danger? the furniture was not conspicuously arranged as waist-high cover

# ¿ Jul 9, 2020 16:51

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

you guys must have a weird gamestop or something where you play the game first and then buy it afterwards if you liked it

# ¿ Jul 14, 2020 16:27

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Arist posted:

I don't think it's saying that at all.

e: also this is tangential but I clicked through some of the other articles linked there and did Rob Zacny of the same site really miss, like, the entire point of the ending, which is that Ellie didn't actually get the chance to reconcile with Joel and it's that anguish and loss that motivates her revenge, the loss of a bond unhealed? He doesn't even mention it and acts like they already had closure! I thought he was a better critic than that.

the main point of his second article is that the final conversation does the exact opposite of what you're saying here. most of the game is spent letting you think that there is this big unresolved tension between them, unanswered questions, and that their relationship effectively ended after the return to salt lake. joel dying while the relationship is in this state does make for a really tragic and compelling motivation for ellie. then the last flashback happens, the "things we wished we had said before you died" conversation that people always regret not having did in fact happen, joel and ellie got to say what they needed to say, and they both made it clear that they still cared about each other before he died

# ¿ Jul 16, 2020 18:23

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

for sure the relationship wasn't healed, but I think the grief would have been much worse if they didn't get to have that conversation. and the game lets you think they didn't right up until the final flashback, which lands in an awkward way for people who already felt that the motivation for ellie's actions were wearing thin by the end

# ¿ Jul 16, 2020 18:42

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 01:28

Fellatio del Toro: Mar 21, 2009

Arist posted:

If they didn't, if they were still distant, than that makes the revenge even less sensible.

That there was an attempt made and cut off before it even really got a chance is what makes the grief so profound.

i guess we'll just have to disagree here. they still cared for each other and i think both wanted to reconcile, but i feel her anger would have seemed more justified if she felt that abby had denied her that final conversation

# ¿ Jul 16, 2020 19:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The Last of Us 2: Remember that time Lowtax posted ITT? [Spoiler Chat]