The Last of Us: Part II
A frustratingly flawed masterpiece?
I have much more to say but I only finished last night and need some more time to think about it.
One week later…
The Last Of Us Part II is a great game and a great piece of storytelling, unfortunately those two aspects rarely work well together and often seem to be fighting each other. The great gameplay is interrupted by things that are completely out of your control. The ideas in the story conflict heavily with what you are forced to do. It’s a great shame because separately both parts work really well.
I can’t remember the last time a game hooked me in so it was always the next thing I wanted to be doing. It gets so many little things right that other games still fail to manage. The controls feels completely natural (I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for over 200 days straight and still struggle with those controls), collectables can be picked up with one button press (see RDR again). It tells you how long since you last saved there are loads of options to customise the settings to make the game much more accessible than most.
It also makes many of the same mistakes which really should be a thing of the past. There are no obvious break points, most sequences run straight into another, obviously meant to keep you playing but really I just want to be told when would be a good place to stop and save. The locations all look fantastic but they’re mostly the same locations we see in every game and for a game that seems to get lots of small details right why are we still smashing glass to get items out of fridges and display cabinets with opening doors? Other things are introduced (trip wires) for one section and then never used again.
I didn’t have a problem with the violence, it probably does go to far but I thought it worked within the context of the game. I did have an issue with the amount of people you have to kill (it may be possible to sneak your way through the game but it seems unlikely) which I still think is a problem in most games. I don’t mind zombies/infected, fantasy or historic setting but in a modern day environment murdering hundreds of humans always feels wrong. In TLOU the endless killing is part of the story they are trying to tell but it doesn’t work, highlighted by the sequence with the PS Vita and the tortue that follows. I can’t be made to feel bad about these isolated incidents when I’ve already gone on a murdering spree.
That part of the game might have been when I gave up caring about Ellie so I was glad of the direction the game went in the second half. I had seen a list of chapters so I knew how the game was structured but I still wasn’t fully expecting what came in the second part of the game. I thought this was a great idea and was hoping it might go some of the way of addressing my issues with how things in the first part played out and it does but not to the extent I hoped.
I’m probably in a minority but I enjoyed the second part of the game more or at least felt more invested in it. The pacing is all over the place and it somehow manages to feel drawn out and rushed. One of the problems is that the game as a whole is too long and I found it difficult to remember details of what had happened over 10 game hours ago (and weeks ago in real life). I even wondered if it would have been better if the game had been released in two separate parts which might have worked better but would have removed some of the element of surprise.
I wonder if the game will work better on a second playthrough knowing how everything unfolds but who has time for that? Most people have said the game is around 24 hours long, I spent much longer than that because a) I’m still really bad at games and b) I much prefer just wandering around the environments rummaging through drawers. I saw somebody else suggest that there should be settings to turn of the ‘encounters’ and just focus on the exploring and story which I think I’d like but perhaps wouldn’t be the game they intended it to be.
My overall feeling remains that the game is really flawed but I do still keep thinking about what it was trying to do. Perhaps the ‘twists’ ended up being too distracting and if the ending had been better implemented I would’ve come away way with an overall better appreciation.
New Game+???
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