A masterclass in production design featuring a truly genius inciting incident that gradually unravels into a thematically incoherent jumble by its conclusion.
On a design and technical standpoint, this game sets a new bar for the level of polish and attention to detail games can achieve. Achieving this on 7 year old hardware is astounding and makes the cyberpunk 2077 "what do you expect from a last gen console" retort an even funnier and absurd argument.
Massive praise should also be given for the near-exhaustive accessibility features included in this title. I ended up using a whole lot of them as the game dragged on to cut down on play time and frustration. Specifically gyro aiming, compass direction hint, replacing all button mashing with button holding, auto item pickup, visual stealth detection queue, and various forms of enemy AI tweaking and resource quantity balancing. Without these features I can honestly say I would have hated playing through this game as this genre and gameplay is a chore for my tastes to wade through in order to experience the narrative the game has to tell.
As far as gameplay, I did not like it. I do not enjoy seeing how realistically and brutally people can be murdered, tortured, or deformed by mushrooms on a big screen, or even at all. The seemingly endless variations on this butchery, while impressively hyper-realistic, are not something I find valuable as it devolves into a celebration of the grotesque and shocking. This extreme content is necessitated by the world of the game, but that did not make it any more valuable or interesting to me.
And finally, the story. (aka the entire reason I played through this game)
I mostly picked this up to gain a first hand account on the controversy surrounding its narrative choices. I can say that the beginning of the game at least, is incredible. The premise is a stroke of genius to create a conflict worthy of making a new character-focused story in the world. The idea of having dual protagonists that are fundamentally opposed, and being forced to play as both, sets the game up to be a wild thematic ride of empathy and moral conflict.
Unfortunately the longer the game goes on, and the more characters the game throws into the air, the more the juggling act fails to keep them all suspended, interesting, and thematically relevant. The themes of empathy, cycle of hate/violence, us vs them binary, vengeance as justice, failing to move on from grief, as well as many others become so tangled in all the angles these topics are viewed from that by the end of the game there is no concise theme or character message to glean from the chaos.
The first game was beautiful to me as it was the story of a man that fails to move on from the loss of his daughter, at the cost of everything and everyone else. That is a brilliant and concise theme. Part 2 in contrast has no narrative takeaways or profound character moments that can compete with that. The nihilistic and existential burden of finding meaning in this chaos is a theme in and of itself, but does not seem to be the intention of the work, especially when compared to Part 1.
I respect the ambition and scale this game sets to achieve, but ultimately think the themes would have greatly benefitted from a tighter focus and a less ambigious "it's up to you" message.
Is it worth playing? If you are into narrative driven post-apocalyptic zombie survival horror games then absolutely. If you are into gaming as a narrative medium, you are good to just skip it and watch all the cutscenes. There is no reason for this story to be told in a videogame format and would have worked just as well (if not better) in a tv series. The Last of Us story does not benefit from being in the medium of gaming and is essentially a movie that you get to hold a controller through.
Overall this game is a technical triumph that raises the bar for gaming presentation and after a fantastic premise for the narrative unfortunately fails to deliver a story worthy of the presentation given to it.
On a design and technical standpoint, this game sets a new bar for the level of polish and attention to detail games can achieve. Achieving this on 7 year old hardware is astounding and makes the cyberpunk 2077 "what do you expect from a last gen console" retort an even funnier and absurd argument.
Massive praise should also be given for the near-exhaustive accessibility features included in this title. I ended up using a whole lot of them as the game dragged on to cut down on play time and frustration. Specifically gyro aiming, compass direction hint, replacing all button mashing with button holding, auto item pickup, visual stealth detection queue, and various forms of enemy AI tweaking and resource quantity balancing. Without these features I can honestly say I would have hated playing through this game as this genre and gameplay is a chore for my tastes to wade through in order to experience the narrative the game has to tell.
As far as gameplay, I did not like it. I do not enjoy seeing how realistically and brutally people can be murdered, tortured, or deformed by mushrooms on a big screen, or even at all. The seemingly endless variations on this butchery, while impressively hyper-realistic, are not something I find valuable as it devolves into a celebration of the grotesque and shocking. This extreme content is necessitated by the world of the game, but that did not make it any more valuable or interesting to me.
And finally, the story. (aka the entire reason I played through this game)
I mostly picked this up to gain a first hand account on the controversy surrounding its narrative choices. I can say that the beginning of the game at least, is incredible. The premise is a stroke of genius to create a conflict worthy of making a new character-focused story in the world. The idea of having dual protagonists that are fundamentally opposed, and being forced to play as both, sets the game up to be a wild thematic ride of empathy and moral conflict.
Unfortunately the longer the game goes on, and the more characters the game throws into the air, the more the juggling act fails to keep them all suspended, interesting, and thematically relevant. The themes of empathy, cycle of hate/violence, us vs them binary, vengeance as justice, failing to move on from grief, as well as many others become so tangled in all the angles these topics are viewed from that by the end of the game there is no concise theme or character message to glean from the chaos.
The first game was beautiful to me as it was the story of a man that fails to move on from the loss of his daughter, at the cost of everything and everyone else. That is a brilliant and concise theme. Part 2 in contrast has no narrative takeaways or profound character moments that can compete with that. The nihilistic and existential burden of finding meaning in this chaos is a theme in and of itself, but does not seem to be the intention of the work, especially when compared to Part 1.
I respect the ambition and scale this game sets to achieve, but ultimately think the themes would have greatly benefitted from a tighter focus and a less ambigious "it's up to you" message.
Is it worth playing? If you are into narrative driven post-apocalyptic zombie survival horror games then absolutely. If you are into gaming as a narrative medium, you are good to just skip it and watch all the cutscenes. There is no reason for this story to be told in a videogame format and would have worked just as well (if not better) in a tv series. The Last of Us story does not benefit from being in the medium of gaming and is essentially a movie that you get to hold a controller through.
Overall this game is a technical triumph that raises the bar for gaming presentation and after a fantastic premise for the narrative unfortunately fails to deliver a story worthy of the presentation given to it.