Suds Richardson
Staff Reporter
The Last of Us: Part 2 is the direct sequel to a beloved title: The Last of Us. In the original game, which is narrative-driven, the player plays Joel, a man who has lost his daughter in an explosion to what later became known as the start of the zombie apocalypse. He has to take a teen girl named Ellie across the country in search of a vaccine. She is found to be specially immune to the virus that has been plaguing humanity, turning the remains of society into zombies, and Joel needs to bring her to a surgeon, as she could hold the answers to saving the world as they know it. In this simple plot, however, the real story is how Joel and Ellie bond as Joel finds himself in more and more of a father position than he ever planned to be while taking Ellie around the country she has never seen.
When they get to the surgeon, however, Joel has to make a decision. In order to harness a vaccine, the surgeon would have to kill Ellie and sacrifice her for the greater good. Though Ellie is okay with this and has already been prepped for surgery as well as been put under anesthesia, Joel is not. Being the shooting game it is, the player is forced to side with Joel and proceed to kill the surgeon along with the rest of the hospital staff and security who tries to get in his way before driving off with his newfound daughter. The game ends with him lying to Ellie, saying they could not use her for a vaccine after she wakes up in the back of his truck. The relationship of Joel and Ellie is what made so many people fall in love with the first game, and the way it ends is known as one of the best endings of any game by so many.
This simple narrative and the sweet but bitter story is turned on its head in the second game. The second game is filled with messy plot lines, hypocrisy, and embarrassing themes that we have been learning since middle school.
The first game was so wonderful in its simple motivation and sweet story, but this is not the case in the second game by far. In The Last of Us: Part 2, the player plays as two characters, which already complicates things. One begins playing as Ellie, only now she is a young adult and lives in a safe camp of other survivors who are trying to rebuild their own society. After getting to know the camp, however, the game switches perspectives to a new character known as Abby, as she is questionably traveling from Seattle with her friends to find Joel. However, this is only to introduce the switching of perspectives since the game goes back to Ellie after only playing Abby for a short time. While playing as Ellie again, she meets Abby in the worst way possible. Ellie meets her only to be held down by her friends as the player watches Abby swing a golf club into Joel’s head, killing him instantly. This is what gets the game started as Abby gets away after knocking Ellie out as well.
From here, the game has one play as Ellie to find Abby in Seattle, with her friend/romantic interest Dina, for around 12 hours with the simple motivation of find and kill Abby. In this, there is a bunch of unnecessary and messy plotlines such as Dina being found pregnant by another character named Jessie, who does not even matter, Ellie killing all of Abby’s friends on the way, and anyone else who gets in her way with no remorse or choice from the player, and Ellie having an unrelenting, and arguably unfounded in comparison to the motive, bloodlust.
Then after everyone in sight is dead, Abby finds Ellie and Dina in their hideout and proceeds to confront them. This is where things take yet another gravitating turn. The game rewinds back to the first day of Ellie’s journey, only this time from the perspective of Abby. This leaves the player on a dissatisfied cliffhanger for what is about another 12 hours as they play through the same time span (three days in-game) only from Abby’s point of view, now with the main motivator to find Ellie, but really it is to get back to the confrontation which makes the Abby section even more unbearable. During the time with Abby, you learn that her father was the surgeon that Joel had killed in the first game in order to save Ellie. This is crucial, as it not only explains why Abby went out of her way to find Joel and kill him but serves towards the game’s childish theme of: ‘violence bad because everyone has their own story.’ Still, Abby continues to search for Ellie, and in that she has a bunch of small but pointless motivators to distract from the fact that the only real motivator is to get back to where the game was finally interesting.
One of the important motivators is that Abby saves a kid named Lev from being captured by yet another one-off run-in of enemies. The point is that Lev joins Abby on her journey to track Ellie three steps behind her as she watches all her friends slowly be killed off one by one before finally catching up with Ellie in the confrontation the last 12 hours has been leading up to.
It has taken 567 words to describe the most basic plot of the second installment and there is still more to add. This game has such a messy plot that does not compare to the simplicity and intimacy of the first. Some other useless plots I did not mention include Lev being bad transgender representation, including his deadname, Abby’s unnecessarily complicated relationship with a character named Owen, constant flashbacks, and the time they took an 8-months pregnant medic from their own military camp out to go on a mission with two soldiers, Abby and Owen, in perfect condition. So much of this game is completely unnecessary and further contributes to it being a mess.
Another point of why The Last of Us: Part 2 sucks is in its childish themes. In having two different perspectives, the game’s main theme is that the cycle of violence is destructive because everyone has their own story. These themes are presented as if they are mature and grotesque with unnecessary sex and relationship issues and copious amounts of violence and other adult themes. In the game’s constant flashbacks and poorly handled sequence of events, it tries to portray what it is teaching as bigger than it is. What the real themes are is that: ‘violence and war are bad and the cycle of it is bad too because everyone has their own surgeon daddy and everyone has their own Joel.’
Finally, the hypocrisy of the game is what really breaks the camel’s back. In trying to present its lesson of the cycle of violence, in actual gameplay, The Last of Us: Part 2 makes killing entire camps of normal people in your way as rewarding as possible. Though the characters have names they may call out, no effort is actually put into trying to force the player into thinking about their actions or using the game’s poorly designed stealth system.
In the plot itself, Ellie is found to be more and more destructive with each murder of Abby’s friends, and it is made clear that every single murder is so much worse than the last and only feeds into her bloodlust. This all climaxes at the very end of the game when Ellie is on the verge of drowning Abby, but after a flashback to Joel, decides not to. This is the most infuriating part of it all as in between each plot-relevant murder you will kill off entire swarms of enemies of regular people because the game forces you to and never forces you to reflect on what you are truly doing, even though that is the entire lesson of the game itself.
The Last of Us: Part 2 is such an embarrassment when compared to the original’s soft and simple, yet compelling story of finding a family. The second game has a complete mess of plot lines, childish themes it is trying to pass off as, ‘adult,’ and, ‘mature,’ and a ludonarrative dissonance between the plot and gameplay. The second installment is a letdown to the first, hence why it sucks.
Image Credit: Niccijade Reeves-Alhark
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