The Last of Us Part II (2020)
Bloody, unrelenting and frustrating…
The highly anticipated sequel to the 2013 original is beautiful and polished, but its initially compelling story fails to learn its own lessons.
Developed by Naughty Dog
Published by Sony Interactive Entertainment
Released on PlayStation 4
It’s easy to admit that while playing The Last of Us Part II, it is very easy to get caught up in the drama of its story. Not only is it one of the single most beautiful and polished games released this generation on the technical and art direction sides, but on the creative side it makes a distinct effort to weave a narrative that is multi-dimensional, complex and illuminating. The world-building on display does a phenomenal job of getting a player invested in all of the major characters, and the idea that “anything can happen to anyone” most certainly heightens the drama on display.
Ultimately, the problem and tragedy of this game strictly as a narrative effort is that...well, it seeks to be a tragedy. Lessons that the player learns over the course of working through its story — undoubtedly the intention of writers Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross — are lost on the obstinacy and unwillingness of its core characters to grow. Maybe this is a comment on the ways in which society has devolved and crumbled since the onset of the virus that decimated humanity, but the final result is a story that squanders its intention and intrigue with arrested development on the part of its major players.
This is further in conflict with the sheer technical brilliance and raw beauty of every character model, building, skyscape and facial expression which continues to illustrate why Naughty Dog is a development team that is among the absolute best at what they do — though, apparently not without considerable cost.
Although only present in a portion of the larger experience, original series protagonist Joel (played again by Troy Baker) clearly defines what kind of story The Last of Us Part II aims to tell.
A new way to review
Reviewing The Last of Us Part II is an exercise in examining what it means for video games to exist as a narrative art form. While some of this may be undercut in the eyes of some by the fact that this is an extraordinarily commercial product as opposed to something like an independent film, it still deserves credit for aiming higher than your typical so-called “triple-A” video game release on the creative front.
It also deserves credit for introducing the dynamic of competing and overlapping narratives to weave its larger story, with distinct casts and lead characters that are initially established by one group, before being recharacterized by the time you get to spend more time with the other group to more deeply “see how the other half lives.”
That ambition in design and creativity counts for a lot, and Naughty Dog deserves a lot of credit for totally buying into that concept to push forward the kind of experience that The Last of Us Part II intends to be.
Intention, though, can only get you so far.
Design and Gameplay
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the art and game designers at Naughty Dog turn in impeccable work of near-perfection. On the art design front, the studio has done a phenomenal job of expanding on the kinds of environments and situations we observed in the first game, and take everything to a whole new level in this sequel. The world was one of the most fascinating parts of the original Last of Us, and the ability for us to see so much more of it is a welcome addition that this game makes.
Characters are rendered with near-uncanny realism, and the emotive capabilities of the characters particularly as they’re engaged in high-stress situations is second-to-none. Whether you turn the camera to look at Ellie’s face as she takes out an enemy from behind, or you observe the long-lens effect and newly-labored breathing of Abby as her acrophobia kicks in while she’s on a particularly high perch, the impeccable design is married to the development of the characters in a way that’s not often seen in current video games.
In terms of the game design itself, it’s relatively straightforward in terms of what it asks you to do, but the level of polish and sophistication on display is once again evocative of the caliber of Naughty Dog personnel. The same general shooting, stealth, weapon and character upgrade and platforming sections return, but there’s just the slightest hint of Uncharted injected into the proceeding with more of an action focus in a couple of punctuating scenes particularly in those that call on the player to make a daring escape from some dire situations.
The game mostly takes place in a post-apocalyptic vision of Seattle, Washington. The environments make clear why Naughty Dog continues to be a world-class development studio.
One portion of the game features a quasi-open world in a post-apocalyptic vision of Seattle, and the detail on display makes for an exceedingly enthralling experience while looking over your shoulder for runners, clickers and stalkers. The game also throws a new infected enemy type at you in the form of “shamblers,” and that’s well before one sequence in an abandoned hospital puts you in the sights of something else entirely that needs to be seen to be believed.
The physics are also second-to-none. Just Google the phrase “Last of Us Rope Physics” and you’ll see why that’s the case. The attention-to-detail also extends to the way that water and other liquids (like blood) react to their surrounding environments, and the game’s 1440p resolution on a PlayStation 4 Pro look incredible even when blown up on a 4K TV with High Dynamic Range (HDR) support.
Naughty Dog also deserves a lot of credit for making this game so accessible to as wide a group of players as possible. Not only can you tweak different visual and audio options for people who might have vision or hearing impairment, but you can also tailor the game’s difficulty to a surprising degree of specificity in terms of enemy strength, the amount of resources strewn about the world and how to interact with quicktime event (QTE) sequences (button-tapping versus long pressing, for instance).
Character upgrades have roughly the same amount of depth but they also have a lot of additional polish, with in-depth animations showing you how your player characters actually modify the weapons they’re using. You see Ellie replace the barrel of a gun to give it more damage output, or re-string her bow so that she can draw it faster. While really in-depth, they also feel a bit overindulgent and excessive, but it’s difficult to doubt the acumen that the designers display in forging the game’s function.
Story
NOTE: Mild spoilers follow in order to adequately discuss the dual-narrative structure of the story.
Taking place initially right after the events of the original game, The Last of Us Part II puts you once again in the worn shoes of Joel (played by Troy Baker) as he confesses to his brother Tommy (played by Jeffrey Pierce) what happened at Saint Mary’s Hospital at the end of the first game. We quickly meet up with Ellie who still appears wary of the explanation that Joel initially provided her. Picking up four years later, Ellie appears to have a far more frigid relationship with Joel and is an important enforcer of the community in Jackson, Wyoming led by Joel’s sister-in-law Maria.
After Joel and Tommy come upon a healthy young woman being attacked by scores of infected, they save her and she leads them back to her current encampment just outside of Jackson. While there, the young woman, Abby (played by Laura Bailey) attacks Joel and reveals that she has been looking for him before she begins brutally beating him. Sent out earlier to investigate Joel and Tommy’s whereabouts, Ellie arrives before being restrained by Abby’s comrades and watches helplessly as Abby beats Joel to death. Before Abby’s cohorts can murder Ellie and Tommy next, they’re stopped by one of their own, Owen (played by Patrick Fugit), who insists that they’ve accomplished what they set out to do.
Ellie (played by Ashley Johnson) and Joel’s brother Tommy (played by Jeffrey Pierce) contemplate their next move after enduring a horrific loss.
Learning that the cohort that murdered Joel is from Seattle, Tommy sets off in pursuit and Ellie follows after him accompanied by her girlfriend Dina (played by Shannon Woodward). The story initially follows Ellie and Dina as they track down information pertaining to Abby and the organization she belongs to, the Washington Liberation Front (WLF) before the story unexpectedly shifts into Abby’s point-of-view.
It’s here that players learn that Abby is the daughter of the doctor that was going to create a vaccine for the cordyceps infection from Ellie’s immunity at the end of the first game, before he is murdered by Joel and sets Abby on her vengeful path. The WLF is in constant conflict with a group of religious fanatics known as “Seraphites” all across Seattle, but Abby has grown increasingly disenchanted with the practices of the WLF and sets out to protect Owen when leadership learns he killed a fellow soldier who was going to murder a Seraphite.
Everything the player has experienced up to this point as Ellie is given a new perspective. Instead of WLF soldiers being faceless, amoral adversaries, they are seen as people with thoughts, feelings, dreams and motivations. Learning more about Abby’s situation allows the player to see things more readily from her perspective, including how the actions of both Joel and Ellie have affected those around them.
It’s a clever narrative device that seems designed to make the player reconsider the violence they’ve been perpetrating for hours up to this point. However, by the time the story reaches its climax, it seems as though the more profound storytelling themes that are designed to be present in the minds of players simply do not — or perhaps cannot — enter the minds of the characters themselves.
When given the chance to lay down the proverbial sword and move onto a more fulfilling path, none of the major focus characters do so. Even when criticized by their own loved ones for their bullheadedness and refusal to acknowledge the implications of their self-destructive behavior, vengeance is just too strong a motivator for these people, and it leads to a story that ends in a decidedly unfulfilling way in which all that effort — and all that blood spilt — feels wasted. Why go through hell at all if you’re not going to bother to learn anything from it?
Consumed by rage and grief, Ellie looks down at an enemy as she prepares to commit a level of savagery she never has before.
That’s not to take away from the innovations that the game tries to bring to bear in terms of the ways in which a game can tell a story. By using Ellie as a false protagonist before revealing that there is in fact a deuteragonist in the form of Abby, it asks the player to reconsider what wanton brutality towards an army of formerly faceless people really brings in terms of value for your soul. Unfortunately, since the characters either can’t or won’t take any of that to heart themselves, the feeling one might come away with might be summed up by asking “what the hell was the point of all that?”
The story is still compelling, but its overarching value feels strangely diminished because of the ways in which the characters refuse to recognize what has happened to them. It’s not that the characters have changed, as much as it is that the characters simply refuse to change.
For a story that aims to be “realistic,” it also seems far too self-indulgent and cynical to ultimately recognize that lead characters just aren’t supposed to be that stupid. Arrested development is not nearly as “edgy” as it is dull and disappointing.
Overall
If this review stood only as an assessment of the game’s technical achievements and the impeccable attention-to-detail of its art assets, it would get a perfect score. In those departments, The Last of Us Part II is nothing short of an achievement, building on the generation-defining work of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End to create a game that is phenomenally beautiful, even considering the onslaught of very ugly things that take place across the entire experience.
By that same token, if this review was a grade of the creative ambition of the game’s story, it would similarly get a perfect score. By relying on the events that concluded the original game to serve as a springboard for all the involved characters’ roles, while also using the mechanism of the false protagonist to introduce us to a new group of people that are arguably just as justified in doing the things that they do, the story is mechanically dynamic and leads to genuine emotional highs and lows, displaying clear effectiveness on the creative side.
The problem is that The Last of Us Part II clearly wants to be an experience that lives and dies by its story, and the way that the story ultimately lands means that this review weighs the effectiveness of the story more heavily than in other games because that narrative journey is so intrinsically tied to the entire experience of playing the game.
Content with feeding each other’s rage even as they may give way to potential stalemates, Ellie and Abby (played by Laura Bailey) seem content with locking themselves in endless cycles of violence. Though one of these characters is more willing to lay down their sword, it’s not the one you likely hope would be capable of growth.
Purely as a game, this is a world-class effort in its art design, animations, graphical presentation and resolution. It doesn’t remake the proverbial wheel since you’re not actually doing anything fundamentally different from other third-person action games, but that’s not intended to take away from the fact that it still functions nearly flawlessly in what it does ask you to do.
While the story was always engaging and thrilling, the place that it ends up with the characters is one that betrays a dissonance between the message that the story clearly wants the player to take away from the experience, but that is also a message that is utterly lost on the characters that are actually living in the game’s world. Where Ellie served as a hopeful statement of the resiliency of the human spirit in the original game, she has become someone who is just as broken, damaged and compromised as the man she tries so hard to avenge.
The same is true of deuteragonist Abby. Initially the villain of the story, she clearly becomes the more likable focus character until you start to realize just how closely she’s been cut from the same cloth as the compromised Ellie. While more able and willing to take the higher road, she nonetheless refuses to recognize that her own determination for vengeance brought ruin to her own life and the lives of her friends.
The game clearly wants players to walk away from the experience of playing The Last of Us Part II under the impression that vengeance is a useless, destructive pursuit. The fact that no one else seems to learn that lesson, however, makes for a story that lands with a disappointing thud, and thus colors the rest of the experience in the same, senselessly bloody mosaic.