No more pallet puzzles: THE LAST OF US PART II

02/21/2020!

spoiler alert, joel is actually dead in this one

Guess I should link this too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II5UsqP2JAk

This is a much lower key reaction than I expected.

i’m trying to remain as spoiler-free as possible tbh

i thought the first one was genuinely masterful so i’m looking forward to this one a lot

joel is actually dead in this one

i’m trying to remain as spoiler-free as possible tbh

if it turns out joel is dead in this one i’m gonna be upset at spoiling myself, just to be clear

Honestly, seeing the early teases for the second one (even though I haven't played the first one yet!) is what made me want to get a PS4, iirc. I figure by the time I get through the first one, the second one will be discounted.

CMON PLAY ITTTT JOSH (bizarro is proving no fun).

jks

What new information does the Sony Worldwide president have about this hotly anticipated release? pic.twitter.com/bh9Revorkp

— Onion Gamers Network (@OnionGamers) October 9, 2019

delayed to may 29

i'm actually happy whenever a title gets delayed at this point in my life. crush those bugs

The Abby boss is straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing

lol at an earlier post itt

So I've reached the point where you play as a different character, which as game design seems to risky! I get that Naughty Dog wants you to view the character as a fleshed out person, but the timing of the POV switch isn't great: I'm Ellie, facing a narrative climax, and all of a sudden we change time and place and I feel like I've been sent back to square one -- it's frustrating!

I agree, but it doesn’t take long to get into it. It is very uncanny though. Different skill trees, different crafting options. I’m always starting to feel a little bit like “fuck that Ellie bitch”

always already

And like... for a game it’s risky, I get that, but it just shows how low the bar is creatively. “you and I, we are not so different” was already pretty hackneyed when John Woo was doing it

Can we assume anyone reading this has beaten the game yet? I guess it's only been two weeks, but...

There's a lot of ideas in this game that can be described so simply, but I think the game deserves more credit. (For instance, I think it goes far beyond "Revenge is bad!" but I'm still collecting my thoughts.) I loved that twist, though I also felt a bit annoyed at the time - gameplay-wise it was sort of a Metroid-esque skill reset. In the Abby run I think you lose all your stuff twice, even.

And yeah, that Abby boss is amazing, the most disgusting creature in a game full of horrible things.

Spoiler warnings of course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh5gzGs-63Y
Also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/video-games/news/the-last-of-us-part-2-ellie-evolution/

Here's my #hottake that you all have been waiting for:

The ending was pretty bleak, maybe about as bleak as I expected, had shades of Children of Men ending (boat in fog with characters questionably surviving). I could see why some people were expecting a twist of them joining forces ("common enemies!") but that was already used once between Lev & Abby and might have been stale or less impactful if done again.

some bullets:

-way too much scavenging, would prefer loot drops after kills
-the infected basically being reduced to background scenery for long sections of the game was a letdown
+the hunting pistol completely overperformed my expectations (esp. after spec'ed out with scope et al), maybe the best weapon in the game?
-OTOH the silenced (!) SMG was such a letdown, good thing you barely have time to use it so your excitement upon finding it is tempered
+the "safecracking" hack that was leaked made crafting trees incredibly easier to obtain (just turn your volume up and listen for the telling "click")
+i liked the fact the game was so PC (strong LGBTQ and/or female characters, thrown in with hints of polyamory, + quite a few non-caucasian supporting roles)
-...but the gratuitous sex scene was just so OTT cringe and unnecessary
+the graphics were amazing, post apocalypse water-ravaged Seattle was incredible
+i thought the story was fine, some people (lacking empathy?) couldn't vibe with Abby's MO but I thought the psychological/moral struggles were presented and delivered convincingly.

I'm in the middle of Abby day 2 and the much needed LEVITY (do you see?) is refreshing and definitely echoes the odd couple dynamic from the first game.

https://youtu.be/6kkXif1_dm4

so in pt iii you're going to play as an infected right

nice

in part iii you play the cop who shot joel's daughter at the opening of part i, though you actually play his first days on the force. it is set in 2003 and there are no zombies.

in part iv you will play an ant infected with the cordyceps fungus in the real present day world. it plays out in real time with a deliberately oblique control scheme taking heavy influence from death stranding.

in part v you are a crafting bench.

in part vi you are a an environmental artist at naughty dog, crafting a series of tiny environemtal psychodramas about survivors at the end of things. you are forced into working a series of 14-hour shifts and 7-day weeks via less and less soft pressure; if the player stops playing, their real world credit rating will slowly decline. pressing L2 opens an inventory wheel in which you find a memo from management, telling you they anticipate your adjusting to "the naughty dog way of doing things", and a picture of your daughter. you do not see your daughter.

Ok so some initial gameplay thoughts.

Combat is fun and polished, with more depth than cover shooters, and more forgiveness than stealth shooters when you got spotted. For a long while this is what sustained me.

Rat King LOL OMG WTF. I knew that this was going to be something horrible, especially since its level is a very clear echo of the hotel basement he in Part 1, but the pure fear it inspires is on a different level, since you have actually have to engage with this big boy rather than make a mad dash for the exit. Is beating this thing what people feel when they beat a boss in From Soft games?

The Ellie boss fight otoh was quite a lot harder, and by how frustrated I got, she was the hardest boss of the game. I didn't upgrade Abby's listen mode much (mostly because you don't even have listen mode on Grounded in Part 1 and I have/had aspirations of beating Part 2 on the hardest difficulty), so as often as the Rat King ripped me apart, Ellie shivved me probably twice as many times.

I thought Santa Barbara was going to be a quick epilogue! So I kept powering through it because I thought the end was just around the corner.

Semi automatic guns are a tease! I never unlocked that ability for Abby's rifle because Rat King aside, when will you even have the ammo to unload on enemies, much less fight enemies that can soak up that kind of damage?

Oops, not initial obviously!

Two really great set pieces too: the on be where Jesse drives and you shoot infected and Wolves, and the one where you ride through the burning Seraphite village.

When I read criticisms that the end game is pointless, I thought they meant that it was nihilist and that Ellie was on an inevitable path of killing Abby (am end which I approached with dread), when those same criticisms were in fact voiced because they *wanted* that to happen.

check out this maniac

The Last of Us 2 photo mode tips & tricks thread:

Let's start with a simple portrait. This particular room/spot has a nice, soft, bloomy light. Finding good lights & shadows make about 95% of your shot. This thread can hopefully help you with the remaining 5%.

01/20 pic.twitter.com/FZwRW86yU8

— Petri Levälahti (@Berduu) July 5, 2020

that's awesome

Something that for me worked exceptionally was how the emotional/ethical peril is treated as equally as the physical peril. I was fighting against Ellie in the final showdown even as I played as her, and I was on the edge of my seat until she decided to let Abby live.

At the farmhouse when Ellie is preparing to go, and like, I love this game and want to keep playing it, on the other hand, Ellie wtf is wrong with you, hate you right now, don’t want to be you

Also: wow they did Yara dirty

Beat it.

It will be immense on “hard” when I come back to this in a year or two. (I think there are slightly too many materials available on normal mode.)

I imagine the final Santa Barbara hacienda shoot-out ought to be a bit better of a send-off on hard, too.

I feel bad about not using the flamethrower more.

When you come back to the aquarium as Abby and find the dead dog is one of the great “oh, fuck” moments in any videogame.

Incredible game.

I think there are slightly too many materials available on normal mode.

Yeah, I was actually kind of pissed that I was maxed out on resources and had to leave loot behind.

I'm kind of toying with the thought of replaying on Survivor, which is almost definitely overly ambitious.

Also OMG at the banner image here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastOfUs2/

So what about the annoying things in this game?

- You get to use the flamethrower like twice
- You get to use the silenced submachine gun for the last scene only
- On 'normal' you never have to worry about health or supplies
- Big resource drops spoiling the tension of upcoming confrontations
- Proximity bombs never needed. In fact, you rarely need to do much more than switch between silenced weapons, long-range weapons and the shotgun. Maybe this is different on hard/survivor - you actually have to plan your attacks and how you're going to switch up the damage you deal?
- Easy finale in Santa Barbara
- THEY DID YARA DIRTY I mean honest to fuck. Yara is like the whole thing for Abby. Yara's what inspires her to go rogue. She risks her life to pay Yara back. Now I'm not saying Yara shouldn't have bitten it, fine, that's an artistic choice. But after it happens, not one scene of Lev grieving for her? For the sister who saved his life again and again? Not one scene where Abby remembers her? I know, they have to escape, but what about after that?

JFC: https://kotaku.com/new-the-last-of-us-part-ii-trophies-tease-grounded-mode-1844678713

Who are these people who think this game isn't hard enough?

Permadeath is an insane option

It’s not quite hard enough on “normal” thi though, as documented in this thread

I thought it was, but ok, for argument's sake, sure - there's already a million adjustable difficulty options to make the game that much harder

Yeah - for me the sweet spot was making resources a bit more scarce.

God knows how I'd ever beat the section where you're escaping from the house with Lev and Yara on the other side of the door if all the difficulties were ramped up including enemy damage etc

oh man, this game

just watched a playthrough. I could not play this game; too violent and scary to actually inhabit the controller & feel all those deaths, and I definitely tabbed through a lot of the puzzle / assault sequences. but being able to tab through -- well, I definitely get the crossover hype / interest in non-gamers, this is a form of narrative more effective than anything television is capable of right now. this game totally takes advantage of 70 years of art film vocabulary like Tarkovsky / Rivette / Akerman and flips it all back over into Romero mainstream narrative storytelling

still a lot to figure out, but yeah, cried twice

Did you play the first one Milton?

skimmed the first 35 minutes of a playthrough. yikes!

only three games I've actually played myself in the last 30 years are Katamari Damacy, Journey, Monument Valley. I don't like holding the controller for first person shooters, but certainly have seen friends playing things like Bioshock etc as the games slowly evolved into whatever this is

Haha, you and I are the same gaming program. Although I did get sucked into one of the Far Cry ones (I think it was 3?)

I started NG+ on Survivor, mainly because I want to get all the collectibles AND also use the item pinging option.

blog it for us Leee

Well here's a start:

Got to the first infected house as Ellie and kind of just noped the hell out -- the thought of getting the mechanics of stealthing and down infected rn seemed a little more daunting, especially as I try to re-acclimate to the combat on a higher difficulty level!

(This all after I kept eaten alive in that Abbie prologue in the snow; in the end, I killed one runner and then just ran away from the ones that I could. I expect this will be a familiar refrain.)

WELL. I can’t just creep up behind clickers anymore on Survivor, as anything faster than the slowest crawl will alert them.

I looked at the trophy list and goddamn it but Grounded and Permadeath are both part of the platinum.

Sorry, platinum claim is a lie: https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/the-last-of-us-2-all-trophies-and-how-to-get-the-platinum#dig-two-graves

permadeath in a game like this is absurd!

TBF you can enable it on any difficulty, so if I'm in an extra masochistic mood and decide I want to try a Permadeath run, I'll probably do it on the easiest difficulty.

Also, I'm clearly sneaking up on the clickers wrong: https://youtu.be/qCV4ivXi190?t=5206

I might have to reload an autosave (hopefully) because I had to clear that section with 6 bullets.

I've been thinking a little about the shape of the narrative as it relates to empathy, namely how as you approach Abby and Ellie's confrontation, the amount of empathy the player has for each character is a mirror image. We start off liking Ellie, but over her Seattle section, she does more and more to lose that empathy; when we play Abby in Seattle, it's the exact opposite, but we grow to empathize with her the more we play her.

Finished this last night. Goddamn it.

Based on some of the clickbait-y online discourse I was really worried the story was going to be misery porn. Thankfully it isn’t—it’s heavy and sad and even mildly upsetting at times but it is earned. I was constantly taken aback by the quality of the acting and how much the performances carry the story, even through the weaker parts.

Gameplay-wise it felt almost identical to the first but I was pretty cool with that. Graphics obv were amazing.

Things I didn’t care for:

-The Seraphite cult was a little undersketched and kinda corny. Loved Lev though, he was cool.

-While I wouldn’t quite call them afterthought, the infected could have had a bigger presence in the game. As a monster lover I really wanted more variety in their types. That said, the infected coming out of the walls and the big blobby Thing-like hospital basement monster were pretty gnarly.

Overall pretty fantastic game.

welp
https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/the-last-of-us-show-hbo.html

I'll probably watch it someday. I'd prefer if it came up with an original set of characters and story, but I doubt they're gonna go that way

ahh the lure of “original IP”

man what an experience. i'm trying to retain some critical faculty and say it had the storytelling quality already common to contemporary fiction or season-length tv, but something about the identification-thru-control of video games adds a much more direct connection in terms of pathos. i was frequently very impressed and more often moved than i have been by, idk, HBO in a long time

i followed the culture war skirmishes of its release only passively but in retrospect it's maddening. sure you had lots of plainly bigoted resistance -- queerness and (uh oh) Gender Trouble is front and center thru the entire story. but there was plainly a ton of snarling anguish at being made to feel something people didn't want to feel.

the worst you can say about the story thematically is that it's hypocritical. like are you really giving me an extended meditation on the warped produce of violence while i'm pulling off so many sick headshots. the worst thing you can say about that gameplay is that it's Cabinet Scrounging Simulator 2020.

i think it pulled off a modernist tragedy. the double revengers arc doesn't complete either way, it's just laid down too late. neither heroine is able to make herself understood to the other. more than just a thwarted crowd-pleasing "rivals teaming up at the finale." ellie doesn't make the final boat trip to catalina herself, maybe to give to the fireflies what joel prevented (though i think it's hinted that mel was abby's father's intellectual heir; so much for that)

i just realized looking at this thread title that there is one (1) pallet in part II and it's a gag

did you ever figure out a slick way to deal with the dogs? they probably gave me more anxiety than anything else in the game.

cry and retry?

not really. pick off the handler from afar, after that the dogs just kind of wander in place

https://kotaku.com/senior-couple-was-having-trouble-with-tlou2-he-answere-1847996198

OK, I just dipped in for a few minutes. My first reaction was, wow, does this game look good. My second was the legit emotions that washed over me, which really underscores how incredible the first game really is. It's immediately such a bittersweet reunion, and I can only imagine things don't get sunnier. Thankfully, I've somehow managed to remain spoiler free, but that inevitably means it's going to be an extra wrenching run.

yeah you have no idea :/

word

I'm barely into it, but I called down my wife to check out the early snow scenes. She was impressed, and said "just looking at this makes me cold."

She asked me if a video game has ever made me cry, and I said totally, at their best they are just as effective as movies and books or whatever. The beginning of "Ori" is up there with the beginning of "Up."

Man, the weight of this game ... things got really dark and shocking and mean pretty quickly, even for "The Last of Us."

The technical achievements of this game alone are kind of mind blowing. But most impressive, even early on (I'm in Seattle) are all the details that they just didn't have to stick in but did, not just foliage or tiny remnants of the "old" world but character moments as well. Ellie was at the music store with Dina, and there's that moment with the A-ha song where I realized, huh, they had to pay the rights for this song and write and animate this whole sweet sequence, but the section is not only totally skippable (afaict), I could easily imagine some folks missing it entirely on the way to the next properly scripted story moment.

Game's really ramping up. Just hit the TV station and tunnel sequences. It does a great job nudging you toward different strategies/approaches, like using bricks or bombs not just to take out WLF but to attract clickers to them. Def. pretty brutal. I assume (hope?) it evolves into more than just a vengeance quest, but if it doesn't the scenery alone should suffice.

It's pretty amazing this was made for the PS4, though I guess the likes of God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn did a pretty good job showcasing that system, too. TLOU2 was I guess optimized for the PS5, but I think it was just limited to a better frame rate, which really underscores the current generation's place (at least for now) as a sort of PS4 Pro Pro.

The birthday side trip to the science museum was predictably touching. It's the quiet moments that really made the first game, and they seem to be a highlight of the second as well, though I do sense that the story is set to shift.

https://media.giphy.com/media/UrsOTbx6xh20IXChwR/giphy.gif

That's more frightening than anything in the game.

And now there are dogs. Fortunately, From has eroded any sympathy I have for video game dogs.

Just encountered the creepy whistling people. I don't think I like them very much.

About to begin Seattle Day 3. It's wild how you simultaneously play as Ellie but also feel so bad for Ellie, the character, external to you, the player.

Lol there’s a few twists in that tale

I've managed to keep myself totally spoiler free for the past two years, but I have been playing the game knowing that for a certain set of people the game was "divisive." I may possibly be playing that section right now? I see its narrative/thematic value, but I can also see how it's maybe for some a bit like the island segment of "Red Dead Redemption 2." I dunno, I have no idea what bothered some people, maybe I haven't hit whatever some consider a sticking point, though more likely the people complaining were just assholes.

Still have no idea how the game/story is going to end, so it remains pretty compelling.

I think that's more or less the case, though it happens at a very confrontational inflection point because that part of the game ends on a cliffhanger, and I really wanted to find out what happens to Ellie! But I gradually got used to it.

Yeah it begins to take some incredible turns after Ellie's 2nd day. Where you at now?

I've been playing as Abby for a while now. I just teamed up with some Scars/ex (?) Seraphites on the way to see what's up with Owen at the aquarium.

Anybody done this on “Grounded” difficulty? eg they hear everything, very high damage, almost no supplies, and you lose the ability to see through walls. I did Part 1 this way and loved it

I imagine that might be a fun way to play if you know the game really well. Or if you want it to seem more "real."

Hmmm, it looks like I have 5 more acts/14 chapters of this game to go. That's a bunch!

I think I generally don't want my narrative games to be too hard, can't believe people play the Ironman mode for game that's as long as this

on Part I it made me appreciate the avenues that bottles and bricks can open for you, since you have to be so conservative with your ammunition. it makes you really think sometimes in ways that never even hit you at all on normal mode

Was not expecting this game to turn into Resident Evil, but I guess it was a good sequence. I'm at the start of Abby's Seattle Day 3, and it seems like everyone is getting some sort of complicated redemptive arc, even the dogs.

Wow. The inevitable fight between the parallel protagonists is so brutal and vicious, and making you play it as Abby is downright sadistic. Like I said, I've avoided the discourse for the past two years, but I can't imagine this sat well with many. I get it, it's a game about the cycle of violence, but I feel there was a better way to show that that didn't involve rubbing your face in it. Didn't help that it followed right after the gratuitously over the top escape from the fiery village, which again, felt like a very Resident Evil (by way of Uncharted) setpiece.

I'm at the farm house now. I have no idea if this is the end of the game or not or whatever is going on. It's clearly a built-in breather after what came before, which is welcome, since I almost didn't want to finish what came before.

Damn you crushed this game, well done

I think there's more but I can't remember

Oh there's more.

I've decided life's too short for Grounded so I'm doing Survivor+ mode which I've now realised is going to stock me up with hella weapons once I get to Seattle.. not actually what I want.. I need the full-fat Survivor. Maybe I just play conservatively but on Normal I always had plenty of supplies, often having to pass things up because I was maxed out

I never got far into my NG+ because I just couldn't figure out how to actually creep up on clickers! I probably needed to go more slowly but I always felt like they were actually outpacing me and thus getting out of killing range.

OK, *now* I'm done. Wow, what a heartbreaking and depressing story. I've got to give credit where credit is due, after the first game's story this wasn't the only direction the story could go in, but it may be the bravest, narratively speaking. Both games are sort of Old Testament bleak, and the muddled morality of the first one logically leads to the even harsher themes of the second game. Still, there are some things that leave me torn, some by design, some ... I don't know how I feel.

Maybe spoilers? This is a two year old game, and the thread is old, so ... be forewarned?

First off, the game is a technological marvel (I played the upgraded PS5 version), and while I am not sure I am better off having played it (since it intentionally eats away at memories of the first, like a cancer), anyone that has *not* played the first game but is getting to do so for the first time in its freshly remade iteration, with this game's tech and look, I'm jealous. The level of detail here is mind-boggling. At one point I ran up a hill wet with rain, and I had to go back a second to confirm that, yes, there were tiny trickles of water running down through the mud, almost invisible in the near darkness.

Second, Ellie (and Joel) are such, again, almost Biblically tragic characters, doomed to never be happy because of what brought them together, and both here are again remarkably written and portrayed, especially in such a rough context. Dina, too, for that matter, and of course Abby. I think spending so much time on Abby was an audacious gamble, but one that ultimately pays off, forcing you to identify with the ostensible villain in a why that can only come from hours of immersion playing as her. There are sentimental and manipulative tricks to the trade at work throughout this, of course, but being able to depict even fleeting moments of joy and tenderness, from different perspective, in something this ugly is really something.

That said, a lot of it truly *is* ugly, and not just in an exploration of the cycles of violence and revenge sort of way, in a really grotesque, cruel, even unpleasantly sadistic way that goes far beyond what the story called for, imo, with a gross reliance on torture that probably could have been handled better. Likewise, all the Santa Barbara stuff really feels like an afterthought, down to its generic enemies; that and the ott showpiece of the fiery village escape seemed disappointingly boilerplate. I feel like it all could have been wrapped up better, without resorting to yet another battle, and another bloody confrontation, especially after all the horribleness we/they have had to endure. It was never going to be a happy ending, but the story could still be bittersweet or sad without almost literally hitting you over the head with it, again and again, until you're just a bloody pulp.

I don't know. Something can be visceral without being repellent. Ellie is in a lot of ways the latest version of John Wayne's character in "The Searchers," and she maybe deserved a similarly subtle send-off. Which the game does in essence tack on at the very, very end, but it left me with mixed feelings. Don't get me wrong, it's all an incredible experience, and in total an impressive continuation of the story. Complex, (emotionally) challenging and morally complicated, never boring. But I'm torn as to whether I'd want it continued any further; a grave can only be dug so deep. I could, however, totally see myself playing the first game again. I wonder how playing this game will inform that one, going backwards?

good post. agree with most of it, especially the visual splendor - i think it's a surprisingly moving aspect of the game, or maybe intentional to counteract the conceptual bleakness. Abby's section was a really brave and effective narrative and game design decision, really the whole thing is.

good eye on The Searchers, didn't catch that as I was playing but almost certainly in their minds, especially with the final shots

Santa Barbara i feel like was a necessary chapter to complete the story but also was very hopeless and upsetting, no doubt. i kind of don't want to see a Part III either, just leave it. Druckmann said something to the effect that if they made a Part III it would have to be a much more uplifting story

waiting for the remaster to hit $20 before I buy TLOU 1 yet again

Some more thoughts, having caught up on old discussions/debates.

I mentioned the look on PS5, but a lot of the clips and videos I watched discussing the game were of course drawn from the original PS4 version. Supposedly the PS5 upgrades were mostly to the frame rate, but man, do the PS5 improvements really make a difference visually, at least to my eye. Faces, things like that. When the trailer for the Last of Us Part 1 remake came out, people were all, eh, looks the same. But I watched one of those Digital Foundry videos, and they went through it all in detail, and came away with wtf, the improvements are significant and obvious!

Anyway, still sitting with this game, which is a testament. I found it remarkable (if maybe not so surprising) how so many people seemed to have had the exact reactions I did, as I was having them, which shows the care and skill put into the game and its story. And as a couple of videos I watched noted, a lot of those feelings and reactions were only possible because this is a video game. As I tried to explain to my wife (without spoilers, since she is watching the show) is that when you read a book that switches perspective, you are typically given a glimpse into their mind and motivations. But when you *play* as that character, for several hours, you are essentially *sharing* a mind and motivation with that character. You are told what you need to do and in many cases you have no choice about it. It's how the story is written, how it has to be. And yet, because you are still the co-pilot, your own morality and sense of right and wrong inevitably, unavoidably plays at least a passive role, and in a few key moments here, an active role, or at least the illusion of an active role.

It's an incredible, and incredibly effective, trick. How do you push the feelings and emotions of the player so far that you can all but guarantee they will feel exactly what you want them to feel, when you want them to? Maudlin or manipulative cut scenes are one way; I love "Ori," but that opening is a straight-up heartbreaking sequence a la "Up." Here they figured out a way to push things further, to make you do the wrong thing even while justifying it as the right thing, and vice versa. No wonder it left me seasick.

While doing retroactive research, I found this fascinating lecture from Druckmann about the creation of the first game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwuPeqZt0s

It's amazing how often it flirted with failure as the team inched closer and closer to what we're all familiar with now. And it all came down to doing right by the characters and story.

Oh, and back to Part II, there are *still* people bitching and complaining about the game in 2023, which I suspect is a combination of immaturity or outright assholes, reactionaries uncomfortable with this game's queasiness who are acting out as a form of denial or projection. And that's not even factoring in the fucking misogynists, homophobes or all around incels. But fuck them. I have yet to come across a negative review of this game from someone operating in anything close to good faith.

A lot of the review sites that I follow (which definitely aren't coming from reactionary MRA viewpoints) didn't like the game, though, and I don't think it's from an inability to empathize with Abby -- the brutality is a LOT to handle, especially as we follow Ellie's descent.

I agree about the violence, and made mention of it as I was playing, but I think that helps make my/the point. Many games we play are innately violent. So what is it about *this* game that made it particularly unpalatable to some people? I think it's because they pushed it so far that it goes beyond fun (which is gross to even write, lol). It's unpleasant. Which of course is kind of a mixed win.

As for Abby, I sort of also agree, but I think the game maybe did the best it could with that. Abby can be made more sympathetic, but she'll never be as sympathetic as Ellie because of the first game. What they did manage to do was at least earn Abby some empathy. She may never be as sympathetic as Ellie, who you have been playing/rooting for a lot longer, but by depicting their journeys in parallel they did show how Abby could have easily been Ellie or vice versa in different circumstances, and that is what made the conflict so complex, despite the emotional advantage Ellie has.

On paper of course they did a great job juggling all the arcs, imo. In the first game, Joel is infected with his own virus, which robs him of his humanity; Ellie is the cure. Ellie's journey here is the inverse, starting out human but quickly descending from there, making the selfish choice to increasingly sacrifice her waning humanity for the sake of vengeance (which is again the inverse of Joel, who selfishly abandons humanity at large for the sake of his own personal humanity). Which brings you to Abby, who we experience regaining her lost humanity due to her own shepherding quest a la Joel in the first game (so much so that when she started crafting shivs I was struck by a sudden sense of deja vu). Just a bunch of intersecting arcs criss-crossing over the same timeline.

It's such a powerful moment when those flashes of bloody Joel give way to what turns out to be Ellie's final interaction with him, which opened to door to hope and forgiveness. The realization that she had in effect achieved closure only to throw it all away suddenly becomes apparent to her, and it's devastating. The same thing happens with Abby, who dreams of all those horrible ways her dad died, only to finally reach a place where she can remember him in a positive light. But of course, she's on the (relative) upswing, a la Joel at the end of the first game. But Ellie is left a lot like Joel at the start of the first game, broken, empty and hopeless. And knowing it's pretty much all her fault. That's one heck of a bad trip.

I restarted in Grounded+ and I’m being lulled into thinking I can handle it because the first bits are so easy and I’ve just done them on Survivor

I like it so far. No health meter! So no way to check if you need to heal I guess?? Just gotta feel the vibe. No listen mode. Which is really excellent. Going around corners quite scary. Though you still do get that moment once you’ve cleared an area where the music changes and you’re like “whew, I think that’s the last of them.” A little corny - a truly realistic mode would not contain those moments. But I suppose the game would just be too unbearably tense without them.

This game would be sooooo stressful without the "all clear" music. Even as I played it, every time a character said "OK, that's the last of them," or "I think they're all dead" or whatever, I would wait a couple of seconds fully expecting some monster to burst through the wall.

Lolllll that would be both extremely cruel and also extremely hilarious

The way the horses cause the snow to slough off those fir trees when you’re riding with Dina

<3 <3

Started playing this the other day (before playing the first, waiting for the pc release next month). Biggest stand out so far is THE SOUND! I just got a subwoofer and this game wooooorks it for those tense encounters with the underlying bass drone happening throughout. The dynamic range is great too, it’s nice to have fun shots and explosions have the volume of gunshots and explosions as opposed to everything existing at the same volume as it is with most games. Contributes greatly to the sense of “violence” talked about above when a gunshot booms out of nothing to take a life while a WLF starts screaming in agony. The silence and general ambience of puzzle/walk sections is great too, gives it a similar somber/epicness that no country for old men had for similar reasons. Going to miss the use of dynamic range the most when I move on to another game.

Wait, you're playing this one *first*?!

I agree w you about the sound H.P but they got carried away with the dynamic range for the dialogue. I am missing many key bits of conversation because I happen to be in the far corner of the room, or I've pivoted Ellie to face another direction, and the volume of the other character eg. Dina, Jess etc suddenly dips way below the music and sound effects. It's a surprising oversight. I've even reduced dynamic range in the settings to try and mitigate this but it hasn't helped much. I've also forced all dialogue into the center channel but that doesn't help much either.

I already spoiled this one for myself (dunkey), so why not just screw the whole thing? Nothing wrong with doing it this way imo.

I hear what you’re saying Tracer but I appreciate this as a creative decision. Want to talk to your friend? Actually be right ne y to them. Maybe it’s cause I’m playing with my speaker pumping (gunshots are loooooooud, worried what my neighbours think lol) but it hasn’t been a problem for me. In fact it has forced my hand into playing loud and as someone with the Hifi equipment I’m glad for it,

Lol that sounds pretty awesome - I am playing at night after my kids are in bed, my hand millimeters away from the volume control of the remote

I remember playing Grounded mode on Part 1 with headphones and it being a VERY immersive experience.. in fact, I often didn't really miss "Listen Mode" because actual listening with my ears was so accurately rendered that it was pretty clear where the clickers were

There were definitely times I missed dialogue prompts because I had wandered ahead a little, searching for supplies. Someone would be talking and kind of trail off, and by the time I noticed the interaction icon it would be too late to turn back and resume the conversation (afaict).

I suspect it’s a classic case of the sound designers all using extremely amazing headphones

It’s everyone else’s fault for not owning $1000+ headphones.

No kids yet, although I do have to tip toe around my wife with this game. Soon as she is home it has to go off. Half because of the sound, half because of literally everything else hahah

Kinda wish I was playing without listen mode now, feels like a bit of a crutch maybe I do t need. Don’t feel like the difficulty is out of control, then again I’ve only just reached the first Ellie + Joel flashback museum scene so maybe it ramps up

Unless you’re playing on Grounded you can always change the difficulty. Either in toto or for individual elements. Pretty much any setting you can think of is tweakable. Apart from a few rough patches I thought Normal was pretty easy. I would definitely do at least Hard.

I don't recall anything in Normal being particularly difficult, aside from a couple of brief bits that probably wouldn't benefit too much from listen mode. Though there are a couple of sequences iirc that I feel really need listen mode.

It's blowing my mind that the PS5 patch reportedly only upgrades the frame rate. This game looks incredible.

That keynote was great (and surprisingly only 40 minutes of the YouTube video, the rest is audience questions). Really cool to see how long and how many iterations the core story went through (wow at the Mankind concept... glad they turned around on that!) Definitely kinda surprised as Druckmann explained his truth behind TLOU1's ending, I admit I completely bought into the generally accepted interpretation when I played it - that Ellie was basically accepting Joel's actions complicitly - the way he breaks it down here shows how naturally it leads into Part II's story.

Man, some people ...

Bro I have not been on Naughty Dog's payroll since 2017. I am not their complaint department. I think you forgot a cc on this one, champ.

CW: Harassment, Threats, Stupidity pic.twitter.com/mwDXorDj5M

— Jocelyn (@Jocelyn_Mettler) February 16, 2023

And speaking of, I've been going back and reading prominent reviews, and ... they're mostly so full of shit to the extent that it emphasizes either how much of this went over their heads or how maybe (more likely?) they weren't ready for what they got. Like people rioting after "The Rite of Spring" or something. "This is clearly good, but not what I wanted, and kind of makes me uncomfortable, so ... I'm mad! And I'm not quite sure why!"

fans think they’re in the game. you’re not in the game. you’re in the stands

I've read a couple takes that try to make the case that it's the fans that are being *too generous* to the game! Can't catch a break, if you like it, you're just a fan, but if you're a fan, you're gonna hate it. I suppose the flipside is that everything one thinks the game does right *or* wrong sort of ratifies its accomplishments. But people like certainty and hate ambiguity, and if a game makes them feel bad or angry, then clearly it must be the game's fault(s), and absolutely no way is it possible that by making millions of people feel the same or similar ways is actually a sign of success, right? (And these are, of course, the at least purportedly good faith attempts at criticism, overlooking lunatics like the person I just posted who, years later, is still harassing the *body model* that "played" Abby).

Face model.

Idk, I can very easily see why people, non-CHUD division, might not enjoy the game in a way where they make a good faith effort to engage in it. It's the same reason why I recommend the game with serious caveats.

My only caveat would be it's not for the squeamish, but in that sense it's not too different from the first one, just more intense; there are great movies I don't recommend for the same reasons. But I really don't see how how someone who liked the first one wouldn't appreciate ("enjoy" might be too strong a word) this one. I've come across a few "blah blah gameplay blah" takes, and imo that's BS. I've yet to see more or less *any* game (short of From stuff) where the gameplay doesn't get old or repetitive by the end.

when the gameplay is good repetitiveness is a virtue

Haha I got very tired of Bloodborne by the time I got to the start of the Micolash stage.

Gameplay, the sequel is a huge step forward, but it's the story that I find needs to be approached carefully. The unflinching depiction of the corrosive effects of violence is an incredibly narrow line that the writers have to walk, and it's very easy for me to see why it tips towards the unbearable for some people. It's also a significantly longer game IIRC, and where the first game has a through line that gradually blossoms into a perverse kind of hope, the hope here is attenuated, gated behind story progression, and buried under loads of brutality, which can just be overwhelming.

yeah agree w that

Yeah, I don't disagree, either. But it all feels like a logical progression to me. Hope is nice to have, and of course this second game is about what replaces hope if/when you lose it, and I think that story only works in tandem with the first game, which ... yeah, it's a delicate balance. So I concede that just because something works doesn't mean it works for everyone. That said, having watched that semi-viral "Sacrificial Trash" video, I'm not entirely willing to believe that *all* negative reviews of this game don't somehow stem from the chudiest of chud takes, which preceded the game by weeks/months. There was a noxious cloud reviewers had to navigate, which is why a lot of the spoiler-free takes I'm belatedly absorbing are packed with cagey caveats or disclaimers or claims of good faith criticism in light of all the noise, etc., all of which makes it seem unlikely this game was ever going to be able to get a fair shake.

I'm not entirely willing to believe that *all* negative reviews of this game don't somehow stem from the chudiest of chud takes

Dude:

https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-part-ii-the-kotaku-review-1844006193

Everything in The Last of Us 2 takes work. Every weapon reload, killing blow, and crafted item takes time and button presses. At times the game is painfully slow; even in the most action-packed sections you put in effort to move things forward. You’re paid for this work in a grim story and explicit violence. It can be exciting and beautiful, but mostly I just felt like shit.

...

TYPE OF GAME
Misery simulator

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020/6/12/21288535/the-last-of-us-part-2-review-ps4-naughty-dog-ellie-joel-violence

That is the game’s central problem, and what makes so much of it such a challenge to get through: This is a story about characters who seem unable to learn or grow, and more specifically, unable to consider the humanity of the people they kill. If you already think violence isn’t the answer to many of the world’s problems, the repeated lesson that killing is bad makes the game almost maddening.

Whatever you think of the current quality of Polygon and Kotaku, they err on the side of social justice.

No, I get it. I've seen a few reviews like that, from reputable sources. I just mean that even those reputable reviews came under the cloud of the stupid backlash, about how even good faith negative reactions can be heightened by bad-faith reactionaries. Or summed up somewhere as "when something becomes fuel for a culture war, it becomes extremely hard to provide genuine criticism of that media because it is impossible for anyone to separate genuine critique from bigots hiding behind genuine critique to try and tear down the 'woke sjw trash' they hate. And even if you are providing that genuine criticism, you are accidentally helping push that culture war narrative for the chuds."

i'm with Josh on this one, the majority of negative takes (as i recall at the time) were generally not well-argued criticism

even the "yes, murder is wrong!" snark is incredibly reductive of what the game puts you through

i remember the "type of game: misery simulator" bit though, still love that

i don't remember if it was that review or another one that talked about how ugly and loud the gun sounds are but otm in any case, it's p brutal

i still cackle though whenever ellie gets her neck chomped by a clicker, i can't help it

Ugh, I still try and pause the clicker chomping scenes to quickly “restart encounter” so I don’t have to hear it. Yet every time, the game says, “no, you WILL watch this”. I don’t attempt to pause because it’s offensive or “bad”, but because it’s intense. That intensity seems to be at the root of most “good-faith” criticism, but I really don’t see it as a point against. It’s the key ingredient to the magic of the game, its commitment to truthfully following out consequences. Those ugly and loud gun sounds are the best damn thing about this game. The sound design is incredible. Every gunshot is a consequence. Even the resource management goes into it. I unloaded a full clip of my pistol into one WLF’er yesterday and was in dread about how I was going to deal with the next one I ran into with no resources lol.

This game has sucked me in far more than others do, and it’s because of the exact things it gets critiqued for.

The sound design *is* nuts. You can hear how close or far the enemies are, or where the bullets or arrows are hitting, that sort of thing. You can hear the baddies yelling to one another from different spots. It's amazing and scary.

I take back all praise. I just reached Abby section and met the dog……… wtf why did they have to bring dogs into this mess :(

My Swiss Shepherd is lying next to me while I’m playing and I’m feeling her harsh judgement. Time to turn the tv off, touch grass, and heal my soul with some doggy time

Speaking of truthfully following out consequences… I know it’s a non-issue in the end but you cannot tell me Mel and her baby were simply fine with very bumpy car chases, gunshots, climbing a rope, pressing one’s belly against steel beams to climb platforms, etc. like wtf, I don’t know much about pregnancy but I know those activities typically don’t align with a pregnant woman’s lifestyle for good reason.

Also also, confused as to why “Abby” is typically referred to as the villain in reviews/dialogue about this game. From pretty early, really as soon as you find out why Abby’s party was going for Joel (even before you find out it’s Abby’s dad), the game changes. I think it’s when you’re in the flashback scene where Ellie’s listening to the tape saying an immune person would be pointless now since we don’t have the doctors to make a cure anymore. Abby’s story seems a lot more justified than Ellie’s from that point

That's what I'm talking about. Reveals the limitations/laziness of the then contemporaneous discourse that she was often described as a villain just because she did a (the) bad thing, in a game full of people doing equally bad things. You can tell who the villains are in this game because, like most fodder, they don't have names (whistling crazies, Santa Barbara dudes).

It’s not even that it’s grey, it’s that Abby is genuinely more justified that Ellie (not to say Abby is right, she’s just lesson the wrong than Ellie).

Joel kills Abby’s dad with the add on bonus of dooming humanity. Abby kills Joel which really doesn’t even make things even on the eye-for-an-eye scale due to that aforementioned bonus. Ellie then kills everyone she can in response, again as opposed to Abby’s gang where only a single person gets offed (well, minus Jesse, but still, the math stacks against Ellie)

If there’s a main character that needs to be called a villain in this game, it goes to Ellie/Joel by default.

*less in the wrong

If your ethics are utilitarian, Joel is the villain, if they are deontologist then Ellie is the villain. It’s only if your ethics are “don’t kill the dude I played as last game!” That Abby can be the villain.

If your ethics are based upon who kills the most dogs (the correct ethical theory), well, I’ve said enough

I think that's call deondoglogism.

They didn’t teach that one in my intro to philosophy course

I'm imagining railroad tracks split into two paths, one in which a single human is tied up on them and another in which five dogs are tied up. Here comes the trolley...

"Last of Us 2" discourse is trolley vs. trolls.

y'all... got some IRL flashbacks last week:

https://i.imgur.com/Ph4l55A.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/7qjUQwH.jpg

Wow.

A friend of mine who is even less up to date on the last few decades of games came over for a beer the other night. He got a hoot out of the chaos and cartoonish cruelty of "Hitman," so just for balance I had him play the first several playable bits of LoU2. At first he kind of joked around, focusing mainly on the look of the game and his own inept gameplay, but as he got sucked in, and experienced his first enemies/set pieces, he stopped cracking jokes and admitted the game was making really unsettled and anxious.

So my current critical crush Jacob Geller* co-hosts a podcast called Something Rotten (as well as a regular guest on the MinnMax (sic) podcast, also a recommendation), and they're digging into Part II, and it's been worthwhile so far, as it goes beyond the typical "this game makes me feel bad" takes.

* A selection of 'tubes to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8n2DHiGp8E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQQdnve5fQk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DqmTtCPiQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS5NeNglQYw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q85l1Fenc5w

Cool, thanks!

Started the podcast episode about LoU2 and think I'm going to go back and listen to the one about Part 1 first. As they say in the second one, it's kind of remarkable how two games and, only recently, a TV show have been enough to sustain this level of discourse for a decade.

I started the podcast episode about the first game. It's good so far, but whoever the hosts are are weirdly catty about it. Like, you know the game is good, you keep saying the game is good, you admit you might be a little tired of it because you've played it so many times, but you've done that because the game is good. So don't sigh and act like watching the TV show was some exhausting experience because it was so familiar to you. Not a deal breaker by any stretch, just a little irritating.

I do find it interesting when they address the 2013 discourse, because as far as I can remember, I had no idea the game existed in 2013. Just totally passed me by. I mean, I didn't have a PlayStation, so there's that. But for a game with so much praise and acclaim, it still managed to go under my radar as a non-gamer civilian.

I listened to the first two episodes of the podcast. The first is about Part 1, and then there are four (I think?) episodes about Part 2. I first guest was fine, the second guest (on the first episode about the second game) was pretty annoying to listen to, since his (Kenneth? A Kotaku writer?) voice kept cracking, which made it sound like listening to a 13-year old boy. I do like Jacob, who is a great moderator, in every sense of the word, which allows him to balance out Blake, who is a little too cynical and cool-for-school for my tastes.

Anyway, they've already brought up some interesting stuff, and keep alluding to a future discussion on race, which is intriguing. I never thought much about the role race plays in the first game, or whether it even matters. On my walk, listening, I started wondering if it would have made a difference if Joel were not a white man, and the conclusion I came to was no. But we'll see where the conversation goes. I do know that this podcast is why I am playing Bioshock Infinite now, not just because I recently played the first two but because they implied it apparently inspired similar sorts of discussions and debates at the time, which I knew nothing about. And indeed, in Bioshock Infinite the issue of race is much, much more explicitly foreground, so I wonder why they would group it in with Last of Us, where race is, iirc, not foregrounded at all. I guess I'll see what they have to say.

Anyway, the discussion makes me feel even more that this (second) game is a masterpiece that will be hard for anyone to surpass. Though you never know.

IDK if you care about podcast spoilers but the gist of the race things is that black characters pretty much all die with a cut to black, and their deaths function taking up pretty limited narrative space (as plot devices for the white characters to react to in the moment) as opposed to e.g. Joel's death as a constant specter that Ellie wrestles with throughout part 2; also, they talk about the dissonance of homophobia and transphobia existing in the world but not racism.

Hmm, I look forward to hearing what they have to say.

Meanwhile, there was supposedly a leak confirming a quietly rumored remaster of Part 2, which seems ... truly unnecessary. I suppose with a live-service multiplayer Last of Us scuttled indefinitely (good) and a potential Part 3 years and years away (expected), a remastered Part 2 seems like a logical stopgap, especially if it's been in the works already. But again, no idea what it might entail, the PS4/PS5 version looks and plays incredibly as it is. I assume they'd tie it to the return of the TV show, though last I heard the TV show had been delayed until maybe 2025.

A Part 2 remaster amid recent layoffs sounds like a major red flag, if that rumor shakes out.

I imagine the layoffs follow ramping down the multiplayer project. Or at least, I could have sworn it was less about downsizing and more returning back to the level they were at before they brought in a bunch of new people for the thing that is no longer happening.

Finished the podcast. Disagreed with a lot of what they had to say, and especially how they said it, but it was still really interesting and full of good insights.

Native PS5 version coming, $10 upgrade, extra content, reportedly.

https://i.imgur.com/tQKPApc.png

They're really putting off working on new IP, huh?

I saw somewhere that this remaster might have been given the the new hires/B-team while the A-team worked on said mystery new IP.

i'm... actually ok with $10

i totally bailed on my Grounded playthrough for LoU II. just too hard. i didn’t even make it to the theatre.

Give it another shot! If I can do it, you/anyone can do it.

And yeah, $10 is totally reasonable. I can't believe TLOU Part 1 is still going for $50+ *on sale*.

Naughty Dog officially pulled the plug on its long-gestating Last of Us online live-service multiplayer game. One one hand, good. On the other, what a waste of time. They've essentially released one game since 2017. Though I guess the same goes for Rockstar.

Yeah from what I hear they are working on a new IP and TLOU sequel. Perhaps they needed to reallocate the team or recycle the assets from the online game to save some time.

Probably spent a good number of cycles on the re-remaster of TLOU 1 and remaster of TLOU 2.

i know one of the multiplayer devs from another forum and he was so excited about it. it had a lot of co-op elements so you’re basically teaming up with players against the clickers etc. to hear him tell it the game was largely finished. i guess there’s an ongoing admin and tech overhead for multiplayer games that naughty dog didn’t want to commit to

essentially the demands of live multiplayer are such that naughty dog would have become a live online company and never make another single player game again

A studio known for its almost oppressively immersive narratives and impeccable set pieces might have benefitted from a 15-year old kid with the handle DiaperDoodie69 hopping around while decked out like Barney the dinosaur and screaming nonsense over a headset mic.

I imagine it's the lure of all that live service money; otherwise it probably would've just been a gradually updated multiplayer mode for TLOU2.
Also - maybe relevant - Sony's acquisition of Bungie was completed in early 2022. Two giant live service bets is probably too much.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/kaitlyn-dever-last-of-us-season-2-abby-1235782912/

TLOU II Remastered out on 1/19, btw

Dever is a great actor. It's too bad that there is no way to keep the plot secret for two years, gonna be impossible for newbies to avoid spoilers. Wonder how that may affect changes or additions they make to the story.

I guess she's got two years to get properly hench, especially since Bella's got a head start on her:

Bella Ramsey begins training for HBO 'The Last of Us' S2pic.twitter.com/zI5fycK3te

— ScreenTime (@screentime) January 8, 2024

Two more casting announcements for Jessie and Dina:

https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-hbo-max-dina-actor-isabela-merced-1851159653

Digital Foundry review of the PS4 to PS5 upgrade barely finds any differences from the way the current PS4 version plays on the PS5. Like, next to nothing, even as far as these subtle things sometimes go. I guess there is a touch extra content to justify the $10, which is not a big ask. Still hoping they take $20 off Last of Us Part 1.

Some of the reviews for the roguelike mode have been pretty high: https://www.polygon.com/24036476/the-last-of-us-part-2s-roguelike-mode

Good to hear, since it's likely all you're really getting for that $10. But I've seen it discussed in the context of the recent God of War roguelike DLC, which 1) reportedly contains new plot and 2) was free.

Ah I didn't realize they're offering an upgrade option -- I thought they were making people buy the new version by itself.

(As for the Ragnarok DLC, yes on both counts.)

The timing of this seems strange, doesn't it? You've got a hit TV show that just announced the cast of its in-progress second season, and *now* is when you drop the Part 2 remaster? It's all but asking people to catch up (and get spoiled) before S2 airs.

Nah, better than waiting even longer. I'm sure this delayed whatever the heck they're working on for the end of the PS5/beginning of PS6 era

I think it's probably the opposite, no? They wasted a bunch of time on the Last of Us multiplayer that got the plug pulled, and this remaster is a stopgap to make some money with a roguelite mode tossed in.

You're right about the abandoned MP, but it seemed inevitable there was going to be a "remaster" of Part II for PS5, or least of a new coat of paint (like the first one) so might they might as well just drop it

I did notice that they are selling this remaster for $10 less than Part 1. Granted, Part 1 was a ground-up remake, but it's nice they're not going strictly cash-grab. Or maybe they kinda are? I could have sworn I bought Last of Us 2 new a couple of years ago for less than $20, maybe ... $10?

the trailer for the remaster looks fucking incredible

Digital Foundry, a bunch of nerds, did a comparison of this and the PS4 version and iirc noticed next to no visual improvements, fwiw. But I think that's largely because this was an incredible looking/playing game from the start. From what I've read (I downloaded the upgrade but won't get to it for a long while, assuming I ever do, lol), the biggest/newest additions are slightly faster loading times, the commentary, (eventually, as DLC) a great looking documentary , the roguelite mode and cool haptics. Oh, and tons of new accessibility settings. Oh, and a couple of apparently fine but incomplete unreleased sections.

For $50 I would scoff but for $10, sure

It's a $10 upgrade if you already own it, but $50 if you are buying it for the first time, which I believe is a price *increase*, at least compared to what it's been sold for over the past few years, let alone secondary. That's kind of eh but to be expected, I suppose, because I really do think Naughty Dog needs to fill the coffers. They are likely years away from any new game.

I loved TLOU2 (top 5 all-time for me) but the roguelike mode doesn't sound like my kind of thing, and I watched YouTube videos of the unreleased sections (the commentary from the game makers is pretty interesting! They put a LOT more thought into seemingly small details than you might think.), so I'll pass on the $10 upgrade (which, imo, seems like a totally reasonable price). And people have noted that you can save a few bucks by getting a PS4 disc then getting the $10 upgrade, instead of paying the full PS5 retail price. A year ago when I bought the PS4 disc, new copies were plentiful at $20.

Also, re: timing of this upgrade release, maybe they are cleaning their plate so that they have full resources available to work on Part 3 (I hope)?

They've been coy about it. I think Druckmann said he had a loose idea for a part 3 but that's it. Meanwhile there have been rumors about a new IP - fantasy of sci-fi? - which I assume is in progress. And maybe I heard they were working on more than one thing? I might be thinking of From. But given Naughty Dog shed a ton of staff when the Last of Us multiplayer got cancelled I doubt they're anywhere near ready to dive right back into that world. This remaster seems to me a pretty clear stopgap.

From what I've heard they're working on two new IPs, one fairly active across multiple teams, the other pretty early going - still being conceptualized, and neither are related to The Last of Us. Would be surprised if either of these see the light of day before 2025.

I'm not even sure TLOU3 will make it to this generation, though you'd expect it to be an end-of-system PS5 title, I think the pandemic probably pushed all their giant multi-year plans up

New doc dropped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3C7GMMfDU

Apparently there is a passing reference to a potential third installment.

Just watched this, it's pretty solid. The connection the cast and creators feel to each other and to the characters (especially Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson) is palpable. The doc apparently stopped filming when covid hit, so the last bit was filmed in 2023, and there's some remarkable stuff where they recount the impact of all the shit surrounding the game, from the infamous leaks to the release, resulting in everything from death threats on down (people even threatened the family of the person that plays Abby). Druckmann notes the irony that the Dutch person that leaked tons of hacked footage was ultimately just a fan, the proverbial young guy living with his parents, who thought leaking the gameplay would force Naughty Dog's hand into finally releasing the game, which had been indefinitely postponed by the pandemic. Druckmann and others interviewed were clearly brought down to their knees with disappointment, but they all seem to be in a much better place now.

On a slightly different note, I admit I am a total pushpver, but it's been a while since I've seen some of the LOU2 clips included in the doc, and boy, did they immediately dredge up dark things I felt while playing the game.

people even threatened the family of the person that plays Abby

More to the point, they threatened her 2-year-old child.

Head and sub-head are great: https://kotaku.com/last-us-tv-show-season-2-pedro-pascal-joel-hbo-1851366131

lol!

lol

Walkback: https://www.ign.com/articles/pedro-pascal-isnt-done-filming-the-last-of-us-season-2-after-all-hbo-says

Gotta do some guitar playing.

We're getting Seattle in Season 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOsAJ7oe2QE

posted this in the wrong thread earlier:

I've resumed my Grounded playthrough of LoU II .. And this really is the way to play. Yes it's very hard. You have no HUD, you have no ability to "see" sounds, everybody can see MUCH further (basically if you can see them they can see you), everybody causes more damage, they go on alert much more quickly, you have to be quiet as a fuckin mouse if you plan on sneaking up on anyone, particularly clickers. (I actually thought they had removed the ability to stealth kill clickers until I finally got one. The technique is to move about 1mm per hr and then right at the end push the fuck up and get them.)

The upshot is that you essentially have to learn how to beat each level perfectly. Run and gun is impossible. There are only a very small handful of moments where you're forced to break cover. So each level becomes more contemplative - like a puzzle - though still quite tense of course because grisly death awaits any misstep. What's kind of mindblowing is that there are entire levels where you can essentially just skirt everything if you pick out the right route. But in order to get there you need to get to know every nook and cranny like the back of your hand. It is the way to really appreciate every little detail that they put into the game - details you would normally be blazing past.

Another consequence is that the game is verrrrrry long I've been playing for hours and hours and still haven't made the switch into Abby, still haven't met the cultists, Lev, etc.

update: i have met the cultists. they are just as annoying as i remember

still not playing as abby yet but i have got to the climactic moment where you confront nora in the hospital and you have her completely at your mercy and the game makes you push square to beat the shit out of her and i did not like that

sneaking through entire neighbourhoods of incredibly watchful wolves is extremely difficult but also extremely fucking satisfying once you figure out the perfect path, which dudes you need pop, which dudes you can leave alone

playing as abby now, and i really like it. something kind of invigorating about being part of a more martial outfit.

before we leave the ellie world behind though, one note: the bloater in the video arcade almost ended me. thank god i had some explosives saved up.

something i didn’t notice the first time around: the WLF people you deal with are like a latino guy, a black torturer, and a potentially trans woman (who you play as). FEDRA is like two good ol boy folk music dudes who live in a fake wild west setting. i liked owen’s “are we the baddies?” convo at the aquarium flashback but i’m struggling to think of anybody from FEDRA had that level of self awareness.

<3 emo-owen at the aquarium.

Abby isn't trans?

the game doesn’t say one way or another.

anyway this time playing through it definitely felt like woke militia vs rednecks lol

and ellie.. maybe this is unkind or just indicative of where i am in the story (eg lowest possible sympathy for her) but she feels like the type of character who would say something like “look, i just think all lives matter”

Ellie is more of a hyper-driven "one life matters" sort of person.

lol well that was definitely joel’s mindset

This is what I posted on the TV show thread:

I have no idea how they are going to misdirect people from huge spoilers. Which is to say, a lot of the game hinges on some big surprises - the millions that have played the game know that, the showrunners and writers know that - so I wonder how or if that will change how they tell this story. Something else I'm curious about, a lot of the power of the second game (which has stuck with me as an uneasy, queasy masterpiece) really hinges on the player *playing* it, even more so than the first game, and I'm curious how the show will (or can) pull off the same dynamic, gut-churning shifts. It's telling that they've said the second game will be split into *at least* two seasons, as there sure is a lot to unpack.

Given people on this thread *have* played the second game, what do you think? How do you hide the big early game shock? Get it over with quickly, in the first episode? Mess with the timeline and stick it at the end, to keep viewers off guard? How do you depict those key scenes in the game where you change perspective and are literally forced to play (and do terrible things) to/as someone you have been (insidiously) trained to love/hate?

I don't know how you avoid that early game spoiler in the show? The motivations for Ellie are driven by it. Maybe perhaps start with Abby first? Show her motivations initially? The obvious TV tropey way of going about it would be cutting back and forth (a la Lord of the Rings movie The Two Towers vs the book), but that would indeed change the vibe up significantly and lessen the impact of certain scenes, like when Ellie kills the dog

Abby isn't trans?

Also from what I understand Abby is NOT trans. Lev is. The idiot sexist gamergate cohort apparently thought Abby was the trans one because she's "muscular". So dumb.

I love (don't love) how the toxic discourse fixates not only on Abby being trans-coded masculine or whatever (which is totally dumb) but also on how hard it would be to maintain her exercise routine to stay that ripped (also dumb, but I get it; it's telling that her depiction in this show is apparently a lot more conventional).

I honestly don't know how they're going to handle this game in the show, especially given it's only 7 episodes (of varying lengths). Given their predilection for detours and flashbacks, not sure where they would even stick the shock, or switch in perspective. I think the most logical approach would be like the game. Start with Joel, switch to Abby, then end with the shock ... where? Episode one? Seems ... too soon, too shocking, lol. Episode two? Seems like it would be hard to pull off rhythmically. Maybe best to immediately start with Abby (she seems to be foregrounded in the teasers) in the first episode, then switch back to Ellie? Do they reaaaaaaallllly stretch it out and end the season with the shock? I dunno!

Somehow doubt certain game moments, like the dog, will make it to screen. Too subtle, too specific? But others will, like the Abby/Ellie fight, albeit minus the complicit, queasy participation of the player. No idea!

So… I did the thing.

Finished the game?

On Grounded.

(New Game +)

I finally bought the PS5 version of the first game, was loosely thinking about playing that again. Kind of feel the same about this one, tbh! But the backlog beckons.

How did it go, btw, another time around on higher difficulty? Um, difficult? Different? Still emotionally draining?

Apparently someone gave an interview that explained more or less that had Naughty Dog gone ahead with its online multi-player Last of Us game, it would have needed essentially full-time/full-staff support at the expense of literally anything else the company wanted to do. So that's why they cut their losses. Makes sense.

It was more emotionally draining. The game is so hard on Grounded that it puts you right there with them in the story, where the odds just seem impossible. So when you finally do nail it the high is very high. Which also makes the lows even lower. You are locked into the identification you have with these characters via the struggle you have both been going through. In terms of the gameplay it's been said many times but it really is the real way to play the game. You know how when you're playing a game like this, or like Metal Gear Solid, that most of the time you have a sneaking suspicion that you're kind of fudging it, that there's a more elegant or bad-ass way to go about your business? Sometimes you get it just right but much of the time you sort of flop from one imperfectly executed move to the next - occasionally really polishing an extremely tough sequence but usually not.

Well. With this you have to get it just right or you die. Which is not to say there's only one way to get through a sequence. In fact pretty much every scene has multiple routes and even multiple strategies which will work. But whichever you do - stealth route 1, 2, 3 or 4; running away tactic 1, 2, 3, or 4; blasting them all to hell 1, 2, or 3 (though it is rarely this) you really have to nail it. You see the areas you need to see, and that they built the game around. You understand why a level has this area, or that area. Infected aren't just randomly dotted around waiting to be meleed or popped in the head, they're stationed in spots that require a certain combination of moves. And to be fair, in the very last stages you don't have to be quite as careful with husbanding your supplies, so you can let go a little bit more, which is immensely satisfying after so many hours of scraping by with just your wits and a few broken bottles. Bricks and bottles become MASSIVELY important. I don't think I even paid attention to it in my first playthrough but Abby has a skill, can't remember what it's called - momentum? - which is basically rage mode, which activates automatically after a melee kill and lasts for a certain amount of time (which can be extended with upgrades). This allows her to one-shot melee kill anyone! There are a few levels where this becomes crucial and kind of the only way to actually advance since your ammo is so limited.

Huh. I'm not sure I could handle this game as an even more realistic and desperate misery simulator.

It's that time of the season Josh. Embrace the gloom.

Outside is enough of a misery sim.

Good piece on adapting the second game: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/the-last-of-us-season-2-abby-video-game-changes-backlash-1236327786/

I thought it was as interesting for *how* they write about it as for *what* they write about it. Some bits I learned:

*Mazin was introduced by Druckmann to the second game as a work in progress before even getting the first season greenlit; Mazin played through the second one as they were adapting the first one.

*Joey Pants is in S2, playing a character only mentioned in passing in the game

*The violence has supposedly been toned down somewhat, which is one reason why Abby is no longer a buff beast

This other Variety article has some more details about casting; it mentions three characters from the game (Eugene, Seth, Kat), plus three characters new to the series:
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/the-last-of-us-season-2-joe-pantoliano-cast-1236327820/

I replayed both games (and "Left Behind") about a month ago (after playing them for the first time two years ago), in anticipation of Season 2. For Part 2, I got the $10 PS5 upgrade (totally reasonable in my opinion), and actually my favorite bonus is the optional commentary track whenever there's a cinematic, which helps you appreciate all the little details.

A source says about Grounded Mode:

We actually spawned more “bumpables” (props with physics) in grounded mode to account for the lack of listen mode. So there’s intentionally more noisy bottles, broken glass, tin cans, buckets, squeeky chairs, etc strewn around on player and enemy patrol paths to walk into.

Also more glass on window frames, which are flagged as “ignore” by NPCs. So say you trigger an enemy to go into “investigate” mode because they heard you step on a creaky floor, their path may (and sometimes is weighted towards) send them climbing thru a plate-glass window. You may have moved on to a different part of the bldg or floor, so there’s just a distant “window break” coming from somewhere to tip you off/freak you out.

https://www.polygon.com/impressions/552866/last-of-us-season-2-review-preview

In that way, a lot of season 2 feels like how Mazin took liberties with the source material in the season 1 episode “Long, Long Time.” Like that Frank/Bill episode, season 2 stretches the story wider than just the main narrative of the game. There are new characters (with Catherine O’Hara bringing a standout scene to the show, as you’d expect her to), and new focuses, like letting Dina (Isabela Merced) be more of a player in the events of the season. Given that this is a franchise that constantly turns over the why of it all — why we do the things we do, why we love the people we love, why we go to such lengths to protect them, and why it even matters at all — that sense of a wider world goes a long way.

Hmm. I was ultimately not a fan of that in the first season. I mean, I was a fan in theory, but I would rather have the extra characters and stories *in addition* to the expected beats, as opposed to as substitutions, especially since season one felt (imo) kind of inexplicably rushed/truncated. That is, "Long, Long Time" is a great episode of TV, but I missed the Bill sequences from the game. And I still maintain that all the stuff with Melanie Lynskey added nothing. There's so much more in the second game, and I understand them shifting stuff around, but it's a fine line, staying faithful to the source material while engaging people unfamiliar with the source material, yet still trying to surprise people familiar with the source material. Stuff added, stuff taken away ... getting the balance right is tricky.

And btw, don't get me wrong, I am all-in, liked the first season and look forward to watching this one with people that know nothing of the game. I think any issue I have with the show(s) relates to a fundamental difference in how the narrative in the game and in the show play out. In the game, a lot of the power and many of the most challenging moments stem not just from the amount of the time you spend with a character, but in many/most cases the amount of time you spend *as* as a character. Of course a show can't do that, so it has to find a way to translate the feeling the game was designed to convey into a more conventional format, for better or for worse, even if "worse" is still pretty solid and/or effective.

It's the game thread, but could this also be a place to talk about the show without worrying about spoiling anything?

One thing that irked me is that weird Helms-Deep-esque breach "Babylon Burning" trope which makes Tommy/Ellie/Dina/Jesse risky decision to leave their safe heaven (in game) seem weak now (in show). Maybe the TV writers' buffed that a little by retconning Tommy as a father?

Why was Dina put to sleep in the Joel death scene? To prevent her from trauma exposure which could put her health in jeopardy?

I couldn't figure that out. If she had actually witnessed, like Ellie, she might have more inclination to join Ellie on her vengeance tour. But putting her there, and then putting her to sleep? Don't get the decision.

Also, while it made for good TV, I didn't like the Assault on Jackson Hole. In the game it's indeed safe haven, refuge and redemption, so Ellie's decision to abandon it is even more clearly tragic. But making it just another site of tragedy makes it easier to run away from.

I keep having to remind myself that they are splitting the game into at least two seasons, maybe more, but I remain unsure how they are going to build sympathy for Abby (the way that playing as her in the game eventually manages) or maintain a balance with Ellie (given she's already begun this season in a relatively unsympathetic light). I've never been particularly convinced by Bella Ramsey as both Ellie and as an actor, one way or another, but Kaitlyn Dever has always been great in everything. She reportedly made the short list to play Ellie, I think they might have made a mistake going with Ramsey instead, but we'll never know. Maybe that will work to the show's advantage, since Dever has the skills to handle a character as complicated as Abby; it's a lot harder to make an ostensibly villainous character more sympathetic than it is to erode sympathy in a more liked character.

Various thoughts...

And I still maintain that all the stuff with Melanie Lynskey added nothing.

After I watched it, I also didn't understand why that was put in, and I thought Lynskey was miscast. However, in the official podcast for S1, I think Neil explained that her character shows how a normal person could be thrust into a situation where they would need to do terrible things to "rise" to the occasion (if that makes sense). So now I kind of get that, a little bit? So to the creators, she wasn't miscast - it's showing a person who was probably mousy and unassuming in their former life who gets transformed - so that personality disconnect was done on purpose.

Why was Dina put to sleep in the Joel death scene? To prevent her from trauma exposure which could put her health in jeopardy?

Yes, that's how I saw it. Apart from killing Joel, Abby's entourage seemed like they consciously did not want to hurt anyone else. (I only watched S2 E2 once - I think the entourage had a discussion to this effect?)

I remain unsure how they are going to build sympathy for Abby (the way that playing as her in the game eventually manages)

This topic came up with Neil (I think it was the official podcast for S2 E1). I think the idea was by introducing her earlier in the season (compared with the game), people would have more time to spend with her to gain sympathy for Abby. I think we all know that a bunch of people hated Abby in the game (personally, I had a fair amount of sympathy for her), so maybe this was the creators' way to deal with that imbalance. I also have an inkling that part of casting Dever (whose appearance leans more toward "feminine" while game Abby leans toward "androgynous") had to do with this, too.

I was skeptical at first, but I like Bella Ramsey's Ellie...I kind of think of it like Daniel Craig playing Bond. Nobody thought that he looked like what Bond was supposed to look like, but he embodied the character well.

But Ashley Johnson's performance during the Joel death scene is definitely more haunting than Ramsey's...the way Johnson said "PLEASE!" is just so unbearable and unsettling and is etched in my brain.

I get what the Melanie Lynskey character was there for, I just didn't think she deserved 1 1/2 episodes at the expense of time with our central characters. Again, it's the weight of time spent with them that forms our emotional connection. The first season felt, on one hand, like one of those exercises where the first draft of something is cut down to its barest, starkest minimum, yet at the same time, on the other hand, a whole bunch of other extraneous stuff was added in. Bill & Frank, Melanie Lynskey, their stories are not ineffective, just secondary to the story being told, imo. Clearly fans of the show have been onboard regardless, but the show, as much as I like it, isn't quite connecting with me the same way the game did; whenever it hits certain emotional beats I find myself drifting back to the game version, and that is weirdly where my own emotional reactions have been coming from, from memories of the game sparked by their depiction in the show rather than from this particular show itself.

The same sort simultaneous story compression/expansion process is already kinda going on with this season as well. The Jackson Hole battle was exciting, but had afaict nothing to do with the story being or going to be told; given Ellie will be leaving it behind, is the show really going to keep flashing back from Ellie's quest to the rebuilding of Jackson Hole?

I think re: casting, part of it is not just allegiance to the game, it's that the voice actors in the game got it perfect. It'd be like recasting Indiana Jones or Han Solo. Sure, you could, but Ford pretty much nailed those roles. Of course, you can't cast animated video game characters in a live action TV show, so there's no winning there. I think Dever will be great and there might be something to your theory of inverting the way Abby and Ellie are portrayed in the game; Dever's depiction is more traditionally feminine, while Ramsay's is ever more tomboy than Ellie is in the game. Of course going forward the show will be more explicitly addressing notions of appearance and identity, I wonder how people will react to that in an atmosphere even more heightened than when the game came out?

Thank you for reminding me about the podcast, the first season podcast was great.

Wow, I had no idea Kaitlyn Dever was Cassie Drake in "Uncharted 4."

Was just listening to the S2E3 podcast, and I think it finally captured, for me, the (very relative!) failings of this show. I loved the games, wouldn't change a thing about them, I don't think, and therein lies the challenge for the showrunners: if there is nothing wrong with the story in the game, but you can't tell that story the same way, you are essentially *forced* to make changes. Yet any deviation you take may end up working to the detriment of the story *even if* you have a good reason for making the changes you made. Druckmann and Mazin have clearly thought a lot about the story as show, and they talk a lot about their thought process, but to my ears they sometimes seem to have thought *too much* about the retelling of this story, leading them to make choices that make sense but don't always work. There has been an accumulation of adjustments and changes (some bigger than others), but imo none of them have made the story better, just different, which occasionally has made the story worse.

For example, in the podcast Druckmann mentions the economy of the game, conveying feelings and information through pauses and silence, but the show seems to be going too far the other direction, making explicit what is already implicit, saying things out loud that we already know or are thinking or will see or think soon enough. I find it less effective, or less impactful. Compare, say, Ellie alone in Joel's house, conveying her private hurt, going through his stuff, vs the townhall meeting, which just says everything out loud, or really any of the stuff with Catherine O'Hara. Good scenes on their own, but imo superfluous to the story being told. I suspect future episodes will reflect or belatedly address some of this ground setting, but it still seems unnecessary to me. Same with some of said changes (like a lot of the Dina and Tommy stuff), I guess we'll see what comes of them.

yeah this is dragggging compared to the game which after Joel's death was almost a straight ffwd in medias res to Seattle, you don't see Tommy for days, only his path/wake of destruction...

whereas all this, "3 MONTHS LATER, "smile while we rebuild Fort Jackson together", Ellie recovery in ~Rivendell~, Ellie's shrink visit, the town hall council, bureaucratic chin scratching, little league game's endless exposition, Clint Eastwood is Dirty Harry... for what?

why waste precious time for all this trifling filler ... maybe they can't afford location budget so they have to settle on dull interior scenes or rely on prebuilt sets for exterior shots? therefore Jackson becomes this MAJOR setting whereas it's just a brief waypoint in the game. Then finally 45 mins later after all this fluff, they finally leave and then only at the end you get to see Seattle in all its CGI glory.

also THAT is how you learn about the Seraphites rather than the slow reveal of their creepy propaganda, not their stealthiness nor their harshness... the TV-ness of this is starting to show through.

Every important plot dynamic gets spoonfed on a silver platter and hand-holds the game's complex moral philosophy via dumbed-down exposition, and then on top of that so much time is wasted so much time on inessential non-canon goofy plotlines/fan-fic for so-called "re-telling"?

feels like the showmakers are treating the show as a way to gapfill backstory like a MCU prequel...

worst ep yet.

There's a real end of the "Searchers" quality to Ellie in "TLOU2," explicitly so, which is one reason the Jackson stuff kind of bugs me. We don't need to see what Ellie might be leaving behind. There is *nothing* that would convince Ellie otherwise, which of course leads to the story's powerful, lonely, broken, truly tragic conclusion. So all this world building is indeed a waste of time, since it's pretty irrelevant to Ellie's story. Don't know what to make of them shaking up Dina and Tommy's roles from the game, either. At least, I don't know what is gained. On the podcast they hint that Dina might have a backstory to drop. We'll see.

The way she reacted to the dead Seraphites made me wonder if she is gonna turn out to be a former member who ran off or something. Obviously the lack of scars maybe rules that out but that scene felt odd.

I just thought it that the smell of death (which she acknowledged) triggered her morning sickness.

xpost Yeah, without spoiling anything, in the off chance you're posting on the wrong thread, iirc in the game she reacts the same way to Tommy's dead horse, for the same reason.

The podcast implied there might be something to Dina messing with Ellie for no apparent reason. In the game they depart as a couple.

Ah yeah of course, the whole pregnancy thing! Played the game when it first came out so my memory of the timeline is definitely patchy. I wonder why they’ve decided (presumably) to have Tommy chasing after E&D rather than the other way round. I do get why they wanted to build the E&D relationship for viewers rather than just have them as a couple right off the bat.

Be interested to see if we get a few Abby episodes to get people ‘on her side’ a bit, or whether they’re gonna simplify things and just follow Ellie the whole time

Supposedly that's why they revealed her motive so early, but at some point they'll have to spend a lot more time with her. I wonder where in the game this season will leave them, given all the fast forwarding. Probably the porch conversation with Joel. Eagle eyes noticed the guitar made it back to Ellie, so we know they had that final meeting.

Just read (or maybe I knew?) that some of the actors have played the game, and some have not. I wonder how that does or does not affect their acting choices?

If the show chooses to skip Ellie's bday trip to the museum in favor of Catherine O'Hara chugging homebrew and smoking blunts in the outfield or some other fanfic, I will ~probably~ stop watching.

I doubt they'll skip it, because it is one of the scant excuses to bring back Pedro.

Good points, Josh and Steve! Thanks for those.

I loved the games, wouldn't change a thing about them

Same here! Just my speculation of course, but knowing that (1) some gamers didn't like TLOU2 for various reasons (some clearly bigoted) and that (2) the showrunners have to appeal to a much wider demographic with the TV show compared with the game, they might feel pushed toward certain changes. (I'm not defending it - just offering reasons why.) They might also be feeling "damned if you do, damned if you don't" regarding diverging from the game. I remember in one of the podcast episodes where Craig discusses certain parts that are exactly like they are in the game, and pre-emptively defending them from potential accusations of "fan service" by saying essentially "I'm a fan myself! And these parts worked well."

Regarding the "why" of having the Jackson Hole siege - when I was watching, I really didn't think about how that would serve the story and was just enjoying the spectacle. They might have wanted to have something like that early in Season Two to keep people watching. But then afterwards, when thinking about it, I thought that by spending more time with Tommy, they're offering him as a proxy for Joel after Joel's death, and the "middle-aged man" viewing demographic could have Tommy as a relatable character to latch onto. Anyway, it's still early in Season 2, so maybe there's some grand plan we're not aware of yet.

Regarding what Steve said about how the Seraphites are revealed - yes, agree with you there. I didn't feel like the timing was right there. But again, maybe the showrunner want to do introductions earlier rather than later, to allow time to gain sympathy.

It'd be like recasting Indiana Jones or Han Solo. Sure, you could, but Ford pretty much nailed those roles.

Hilariously enough, the voice actor for Joel in the games, Troy Baker, plays Indiana Jones in the Great Circle that just came out and got surprisingly great reviews.

Yeah, I didn't even consider that, but that is ironic!

Re: TV demo, if I had to guess I'd say they are not going to change a thing about the more "controversial" elements of the game and instead will double down, make everything more amplified and explicit. There will be, say, an entire episode dedicated to Lev's backstory, and the showrunners will be very smug about it.

Re: Tommy, I got no idea what they are up to. In the game he is as vengeance driven as Ellie.

I entirely disagree with the general sentiment here so far m to me season 2 is trying very hard to be its own thing and I think that's to the show's credit. Season 1 just felt so superfluous to the game because of the combination of how closely it hewed to the game and how relatively short it was -- 10 episodes made things feel too perfunctory. Add in the fact at how the game's narration already uses the vocabulary of prestige television and film, and season 1 felt like the Gus Van Sant Psycho.

And while I liked Part 2, a lot of times I didn't enjoy playing it (not too say the experience was devoid of thrills: the rat king fight!), even though it did move me in a lot of ways. So seeing Dina and Ellie just vibing and doing the totally relatable Band ABCs was lovely, and I think it's an effective way of leading up to and balancing out the coming brutality. It might end up saying the same thing as the game in the end, but I can appreciate it getting there by a different path.

Also the show SHOULD give Lev a proper story, he's barely more than a plot device in the game, especially compared to Abby and Ellie.

Iirc there is a lot of Dina and Ellie chilling on a horse at the start of the game, when they get to Seattle. I think the show was very close, because I remember the same feeling playing the game as watching the show, when you get to the first signs of Seattle civilization and your first instinct is that you are going to get ambushed.

In fact, so far I actually think the general narrative of this season has been very similar to the game, just mixing up a bit of the who-did-what-and-when stuff from the game (which may be important), and throwing in a couple of new characters and set pieces (which haven't been important). I agree that there are a lot of different ways the show could go, and we won't know if the choices being made are good or bad until we get to the end. The fact that they are splitting the game up into at least two seasons gives them a lot of flexibility. (I believe they even implied there's been some thought of making the second game into *three* seasons.)

I think it's possible to show Lev's backstory in a thoughtful and non-pandering way. But it may be tricky (but maybe also liberating) going from the 1st person perspective of the game to the 3rd person perspective. Like in the game, there's that exchange between Abby and Lev, where Lev is like "Are you wondering why they called me Lily?" and Abby's like "Well, do you want to talk about it?" and then Lev is like "No, not really." Like, when you're playing as Abby, it's having you respect that privacy.

I entirely disagree with the general sentiment here so far m to me season 2 is trying very hard to be its own thing and I think that's to the show's credit.

Yes, it does need to be its own thing, I agree - we don't want a repeat of the game, but some of the criticism here is in the ways they're diverging or expounding. Like, I think everybody absolutely loved the S1 Bill/Frank episode (again, speculation here, but that rapturous praise may be influencing their approach with Season 2.)

I remember finishing the games for the first time and feeling absolutely emotionally drained - I personally thoroughly enjoyed Season 1, but it didn't have that level of impact - that alone isn't how we should measure things of course, but I gotta think about why that is.

Oh yeah, I take back what I said about not changing a thing about the game - I would change just one thing: remove the Abby sex scene. Totally did not feel necessary. (The TLOU2 game podcast discusses this - they said that their philosophy for explicitness in a sex scene is to show just what is needed by the story. Even though they said that, I disagree that it was necessary. Not a prude but it didn't feel right. They could have ended the scene earlier. But maybe they just wanted to show off their expertise in CGI nipple technology.)

Totally forgot about that, at the very least the relative explicitness of that scene does stick out as unnecessary, though perhaps Druckmann was going for the same sort of heavy-handed juxtaposition that the end of Spielberg's "Munich" aimed for. I know that movie was in the mix as inspiration.

I liked the new episode. A good example of how to remain faithful to the game and yet go about things a different way. Also an example of how to pare things down without losing anything.

Just adding that Isabela Merced is doing a lot of work this season, but also that her monologue about liking boys and girls was a good example of reduntantly doubling down on what we were talking about. Like, clearly her character likes boys and girls. She's been with Jesse but has also been flirting hard with Ellie. So why the need to talk about it explicitly? Show don't tell.

On the other hand, a good example of changes from the game made for the better is the revelation of Ellie's immunity to Dina. Iirc in the game she's exposed to spores and has to explain to Dina why she's not getting infected. In this episode, she's bitten, and we get to see Dina's more visceral reaction, as she calculates whether she needs to kill Ellie. Same outcome, different path, one perhaps better suited to television.

Oh, also, reading reactions online, I think I agree with some criticisms that they've made Ellie too ... nice? Or at least, not quite yet a relentlessly driven rage beast. I'm sure she'll get there, but for now she does not seem like someone that would pursue her goals at all costs, even if it means losing Dina.

I listened to the latest podcast episode, and I've got to admit, the guys are sounding a bit smug. But imo the show they are describing and the strategic decisions they are touting are not really translating as well as they should this season. Craig and Neil are so smart, but strangely I don't think they are making the smartest choices. Show is still good, of course, just falls short of the game; I watched a couple of cutscenes from the TLOU2, and the acting and faces of the animated scenes were imo more powerful than the equivalent in the show. Like the acting/writing/direction here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPEt2CtJ_Rk

The way they've neutered all the strong females in the show is quite problematic, and because they've already established this as a male-dominated adaption that they need to commercialize in a post-Hillary/Kamala world... so that when all hope is ending, of course you need to rewrite bring in some deus ex machina non-game-event man to the save the day. So instead of Dina and Ellie saving Jesse's life from certain death and bringing him to safe harbor, he comes in like JOHN RAMBO ESQ of course.

also lol I double taked at Nora because I thought "there's no way they're already introducing Lev" before I remembered her from the earlier ep.

I can only imagine the horror of someone buying this game based on this mickey mouse TV show and queuing up the game only to play as Ellie (and Abby) vengefully brutalizing and massacring hundreds (thousands?) of not just infected but humans when they expected some smarmy rosy buddy/chickflick set in a patriarchy of the show's universe.

I'd been approaching the show like it was telling the story of the game but in a different way, but now I sort of feel like it is telling a slightly different story than the game, albeit with many of the same beats. I'm still frustrated that there are scenes and sequences that take longer in the game that the show rushes through, and less consequential elements of the game that the show inflates unproductively. The show seems a lot more interested in how society works or doesn't work than the game did, for better or for worse, though I can see why they went that direction. In the game, almost everything is incidental to the separate quests, with you learning about things as they do, but TV tells its stories differently. I would prefer more show and less tell, but I also get why they can't match what the game does. It needs to be entertaining as well as compelling,

Anyway, I didn't have a problem with this episode, except it seems like it's in a hurry to get back on track with elements of the game it inexplicably deviated from in the first place. Though one key change I totally understand is not killing so many animals. It appears that Shimmer may emerge unscathed, and by this point in the game killing dogs has become second nature. Of course, that sets up one of the game's saddest reveals that one person's evil dog is another person's kind pet, but again, this show seems to be going for something different from the game's endless parade of misery.

Love when certain sets look exactly like the game. Not sure I love how Dina and Ellie always have clean clothes and great hair.

Incidentally, on the ILE no-game thread, some folks have complained about echoes of "The Walking Dead," and it got me thinking. I didn't get "Walking Dead" vibes from the game *at all*, and I've been trying to pinpoint whether the TV show is doing anything specific to point it in that direction or if it's just that TV is a fundamentally different medium that doesn't lend itself well to the story (or the way the story is told) in the game. It could be simply that much of the game is more or less solo (or maybe paired up) sequences and exploration, but the show doesn't want to do things that way, even though a long stretch of just Ellie would benefit both show and character, just as more time with only Joel and Ellie in S1 would have been better, too.

I do think the way Ellie is being written/portrayed is wrong, not just because it is different from the game but because it's at odds with the ostensible themes and story. In the show they are not doing a good job establishing her as a relentless killing machine, and in fact having her and Dina on the same page (per Dina's monologue) might further impair some of the saddest, most tragic parts of the game, when Ellie chooses revenge over Dina. Saw this somewhere else and it further summed up some of my reservations as well:

On paper, the show is telling the story of two reckless, revenge-driven young women who are too focused on avenging Joel to think rationally. But, in practice, Dina and Ellie come across too cool, calm, and collected for that idea to land. They still get caught up in high-stakes “I love you”s and sweeping pre-battle kisses, but they’re self-aware about their own recklessness in a way that makes that recklessness less interesting to watch.

The game suffered slightly from Wisecrack Syndrome - Ellie and Abby both coming out with the same style of gallows humour in the face of horror, clearly from the same pen. That's as far as I'll go in criticising the game though. In other respects it showed how utterly shattered they were, and trauma was the overriding vibe. I haven't seen the show and likely never will but yeah, it seems pretty core to the story that Ellie has been traumatised and that has changed something funamental inside her, broken an important part of her that not even the power of redemptive narrative can fully heal.

Re: Walking Dead that's another show I'll never see but I do remember when the first LoU came out, thinking, oh great, another post-apocalyptic zombie game. And it is another post-apocalyptic zombie game. Yet it's so fully itself, so artfully made, that somehow all the comparisons just fall away.

I know what you mean about the wisecracking but I think that stuff is important, because by the end Ellie has nothing left, no Joel, no Dina, no community, no nothing, not even that tiny spark of mirth those wisecracks revealed. She's just empty and alone. Which - and I know you haven't seen it - the most recent episode of the TV once again literally tells rather than shows when they get to an abandoned warehouse:

Ellie: “It’s haunted but empty.”
Dina: “Oh, just like us.”

It's meant as a wisecrack, but it's so on the nose it's unavoidable. Esp. because the show has yet to depict either character with that degree of resigned nihilism.

Lol that is kind of funny though.

Was just reading some fan/internet thoughts on the show, and ... yeah, they're pretty mixed at best, and often similar to my thoughts. I think this show has made some inexplicable mistakes (most notably revealing Abby's backstory/impetus early and neutralizing any suspenseful/mysterious "why?" element) that do nothing but hinder the story. And whether or not the show is telling a different story or telling that story differently, then ... what story *is* it trying to tell? Because we only have two episodes left, and at least one looks like it will be flashback and the last will likely be the confrontation between Ellie and Abby, but if you told me the show was about the cycle of violence or Ellie's descent into empty-soul rage, this show is absolutely not doing that, or at least not well, which is one reason, say, the confrontation with Nora came off more mechanical in the show than it does in the game, where iirc it was one of the first major disturbing "why are you making me do this?" player moments.

I really can't figure out *why* the show is going wrong in this way, given Druckmann's involvement and Mazin's respect for the source material. All I can think of is that Druckmann is doing his best to remain hands off and hand the reigns to Mazin, or maybe he's totally checked out after so much time spent so close to the material (or distracted by work on the new game). Or maybe Mazin (who, as a reminder, was credited with almost nothing but shit before "Chernobyl") is either not up for the task or, maybe more likely, so set on proving himself an auteur that he is awkwardly reshaping the story into something it's not, or can't be? And Druckmann, maybe intrigued by the changes, has convinced himself that they are smart, or ... I dunno. Just kind of frustrating to see it fall so short of the games.* It's like we've all digested a complete director's cut masterpiece but are now being retroactively delivered a rough draft.

*(as good as much of the show often still is!)

the show is a kidz bop version of the game

I don't think it's that bad, because it's pretty gruesome and gritty at times (we just saw a guy lynched and eviscerated), but it's still pulling its punches, emotionally and narratively. Playing it too safe, speeding through story beats without letting them breathe or, more importantly, build.

Saw this discussion on reddit (I know...) that helped key in a bit more on what doesn't seem right about this season and/or show:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastofus/comments/1kobqd7/why_is_show_ellie_stupid/

OK, now this is interesting. I thought this new episode was good, but also mostly because it's really faithful to the game, with a few exceptions (in the form of additions). I did notice at the very beginning of the ep the *three* writing credits: Mazin, Druckmann and ... Hailey Gross, who of course co-wrote the second game. At first I thought, oh, they gave her credit *because* so much of this episode is drawn directly from the game, but then I thought, no, this wasn't a "based on" or "adapted from" sort of credit, I think she's just a really good writer and better at adapting the game to TV than Mazin. Like, the Joel childhood backstory or Eugene? I bet that was Mazin. But Gross was the real MVP and I see she's also credited on next week's season finale, which is promising.

Anyway, this episode underscores what's been off with the rest. It takes its time, it lets characters think and stew, it's not in a hurry to get to some action sequence, and so on. It still says out loud too many things that could have been more subtle, but hey, it's TV. Something I am very curious about is that if next week is indeed the inevitable Ellie/Abby confrontation in the theatre, then next *season*, S3, will be focused largely on Abby's journey, with I assume bits of Ellie and Dina at the farm in there. That's going to be a pretty big shift for the show, and maybe even *less* successful if they try to speed though it. My suspicion, something hinted at by the runners, is that the Part 2 adaptation will indeed need and get another season.

OK, now this is interesting. I thought this new episode was good, but also mostly because it's really faithful to the game

ok you lost me.

this was the first ep i didn't finish and honestly i'm not in any hurry to pick it back up. the only faithful part was the birthday scene which in the game is one of the highlights and even that was given the backseat to more of this non-canon "character development" rewriting/reimagining that is on par with Dick Tremayne/James&Evelyn/Windham Earle in terms of steep S2 drop-offs.

maybe i should finish the ep before i disparage your "really faithful" claim tho 😅

Ha. I mean, much of the episode - the visit to the museum, the porch scene - was pretty close to the game equivalent, and didn't add too much BS, and those two scenes are what people will take away from the ep. A lot of other stuff was more unnecessary - the Joel origin story with Tony Dalton, the scene with Joey Pants - but at least they were well acted, so I had no problem with them as an episode. Now, I do think putting the porch scene here, as much as I understand why they did it (putting it at the end, as it is in the game, would meaning making game-casual viewers literally wait years for the flashback) was a mistake, which robs it of power/impact. It also does the thing I think I noted above, changing things from the game to no appreciable narrative benefit, because now they have to find a new way to end the show, which I saw Druckmann concede in an interview.

Also saw a interview with Mazin that makes me think he is truly full of shit. In it he claims he was shocked no one online seemed to take issue with Dina and Joel going to the lodge, not Tommy and Joel, but tons of people did. Same with postponing Dina and Ellie's relationship, which was also pointless and also throws off the rhythm of the story.

But yeah, long story short, I liked this episode, did what it had to do even if I wasn't 100% on board with how/when it did it. And no matter how I feel about specific episodes, I'm really bummed that this season is making the same mistakes as the first, but bigger and more (negatively) impactful. I wonder if any of it plays poorly for those unfamilair with the game? Maybe.

I think this season is proving Mazin to be a hack who got lucky with Chernobyl more than the right director to realize this vision. Watching this season does nothing more than make me want to play the game again, which I probably will now (just bought the PS5 upgrade for $10).

play it on grounded 🙏

proving Mazin to be a hack who got lucky with Chernobyl

not lucky enough to not get locked out of the edit room on Chernobyl due to his behaviour during production

tbf it did leave him free time to try to get elected to VP of the WGA so he could union-bust it from the inside

Oh wtf?!!!

I would agree that Mazin maybe lucky, except that Druckmann is also involved here and so is, on a couple of episodes, Halley Gross. So how, with the game and its story and its look and its characters all right there, they kind of bobbled the ball in this way ... I just don't get it. Everything is rushed, changes made have not generally been for the better and, for that matter, even when they don't make things worse don't add much, either. I just ... I dunno. The episodes are too short, cutting out too much good stuff, and there are too few of them, forcing more rushing. The production design, the cast in general, it's all making this better than it could have been, but I'm still pretty bummed. There's only so much they can do to make up for scripts that seem to have been shaved down to their bare minimum when the story and characters deserve so much more. Makes me want to play the game again, which is so good that I suspect I would feel just as strongly about it the second time as I did the first.

Also, piggybacking off the ILE thread where I guess maybe my comments have not been welcome, I have no problem with changes, but they should be for a good reason, and imo the changes being made here have not always been for good reasons, especially when the changes made seem to undercut the themes of the game. So, sure, you can change things, but if you're going to mess around enough with the game just because you can, then why even tell the same story, or largely the same story? I think there is room for all the stuff they've done, they've just done it at the expense of what they should have focused on first. (Again, imo.) That is, Bill and Frank in the first season, there's nothing wrong with that episode other than that its run time and budget comes at the expense of other stuff that might have made the season better, as good as that episode might have been. Same with Melanie Lynskey in S1, whose character added up to nothing, or Gail and Eugene in this season, who largely served to emphasize or make explicit ideas that were already implicit. And there's nothing wrong with Bella Ramsey, per se, just that she doesn't seem to be quite good enough to improve the not good enough material or character development being handed to her, as opposed to Merced, who lights up here scenes.

So, again, back to the other thread. Sure, people comparing things to the game might seem annoying, but ... it's an adaptation of the game! So it's fair game, so to speak, imo. But also, the problems people seem to be having with this season in particular ... it's largely *because* of those changes!!

OTM. I think the Gail and Eugene bits were added to replace the flashback scene where Ellie goes back to SLC and listens to the tape recording. They needed a mechanism in place for Ellie to know for sure what Joel had done. In that sense I get it, but it's not as powerful as Ellie going to the scene of the crime and seeing what Joel did herself as she did in the game, but in this case I bet it was budget that led to this narrative change.

Two other changes in the finale bugged the hell out of me which I felt totally detracted from the story, and there are some interesting, if extremely unsatisfying, answers from the show runners. First, Ellie's visit to the Seraphite Island - this felt like some rushed, cheap mechanism to attempt to dumb-splain an audience where the WLF was attacking that night. Here's Druckman's explanation:

Neil Druckmann: I will, just to add to that, because, you know, sometimes in adding something that was cut from the game requires you to remove something that was in the game. So, here that sequence where Ellie like drifts to the Seraphite Island and almost gets lynched herself was something we used to have in the game and cut it for just production pacing purposes. And then now- now we had like three horrible things in a row, we had like that sequence, Alice and then Mel. And in our conversation, we're like this, probably one, one too many.

Perhaps it was cut from the game for a reason? You know ... production pacing? Which its addition in the show mars? That whole day 3 approach to the aquarium was just perfect in the game as is. There was no need for such a side quest! So what did they cut then to balance? Alice, the other change that really had me scratching my head. Here's the justification for that from Mazin:

“In the game, when Ellie arrives in the aquarium, a dog attacks her and she stabs it to death, and we don’t know this dog,” said Mazin. “I won’t get into what happens later, because there’s referring to what’s next season, but we had a situation where a number of horrible things were happening. Plus, because it’s live action, the nature of violence becomes much more graphic. It’s more graphic because it’s not like there’s an animation between you and it, it’s people, and it’s very disturbing. We knew what was going to happen to Mel was disturbing, and to Owen, and also what had just happened to Ellie was disturbing.

I felt Alice and the gruesome and ruthless nature of Owen and Mel's deaths really highlighted how dark Ellie had truly become, and really amplifies these moments' importance after you go through Abby's perspective and build empathy for them. Ellie's actions and ruthlessness mirror Abby perfectly, and I feel the show is trying to maintain a semblance of moral superiority or "innocence" within Ellie here that not only feels off with the story, but even at odds with the character as portrayed by Bella Ramsey.

Ultimately this post is just repeatedly underlying your point, Josh, in that the changes made seem to undercut the themes of the game.

It's like they took out some of "the juice". Alas.

That's the bummer of it all. The fundamentals of the game are still there, they've just been ... weakened or watered down, I guess. Which is the prerogative of any adaptation, but then why adapt something if you are going to denature it? This show feels sort of like one of those awkward or wayward director's cuts of a movie, a new version that fundamentally changes things by putting stuff back in but also takes important stuff out. I feel like it would benefit greatly from the "Lord of the Rings" extended version treatment, longer and with more details and character beats and moments that made the source material what it is. Gail and Eugene, Bill and Frank, that sort of stuff is what should have been *added* to an extended cut, which could have made the story even better.

I do like Kaitlyn Dever a lot, and look forward to watching her in S3, but after this season I may have changed my mind and no longer see how they can do four seasons without focusing on a bunch of War in Seattle BS, though the overlapping nature of the story implies that, yes, we're going to get that epic island battle between the Wolves and the Scars. So are we going to get the Santa Barbara epilogue? Probably. Are we going to get Ellie and Dina at the farm? Probably. But have they depicted Ellie as a relentless revenge machine to the degree that would drive her to the game's final conflict. Imo no, and that was the failure of this season and maybe the crux of it all: how do you make your lead protagonist an unlikeable monster? There was no avoiding doing that for Abby, but Ellie's poor choices this season have been depicted as products of immaturity, or impatience, or, less generously, ignorance, yet in the game she knows exactly what she is doing.

From the AVClub review:

Which isn’t to say that I needed this finale to wrap up everything in a nice, neat bow. But I did want it to deliver a sense of thematic finality—to clarify the emotional beginning, middle, and end of the season, even if there’s still more plot to unspool. “What has Ellie’s revenge mission wrought?” could have been a powerful emotional button if this episode had lingered on the tragedy of Jesse’s death. “How has Seattle changed Ellie and Dina?” could have been another, if Isabela Merced weren’t so weirdly sidelined this week.

But “What did a character we don’t really know do for the last three days?” is basically at the bottom of the list of things I care about right now—the sort of hook that only exists because this show is adapted from pre-existing source material and needs to get ahead of fan explainers that would spoil that structural twist in the long gap between seasons. A good cliffhanger leaves you wanting more. This one just kind of made me shrug, especially because we already know much more about Abby’s motivations than gamers did when the POV shift happened.

HBO’s “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale aired to half the audience that tuned into the Season 1 finale of the video game adaptation, as Sunday’s season closer saw 3.7 million cross-platform viewers. That’s down 55% from the Season 1 finale, which scored 8.2 million cross-platform viewers, then an impressive feat given that it aired opposite the Oscars.

Season 2 premiered to 5.3 million cross-platform viewers.

HBO cautions that “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale viewership is expected to grow due to low tune-ins on the holiday weekend, and stressed that the franchise overall has seen 90 million viewers since Season 1 ended. Season 2 is tallying nearly 37 million global viewers per episode.

Ellie's poor choices this season have been depicted as products of immaturity, or impatience, or, less generously, ignorance, yet in the game she knows exactly what she is doing.

Couldn't have said it better myself

https://i.imgur.com/NZirtHu.png

💀💀💀