The Last of Us Part 2 Retrospective

The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time. I believe I made that very clear in my previous video. Its incredible character writing and seamless flow between gameplay and story elevated the cinematic gaming experience Naughty Dog started with the Uncharted series to new heights, creating an absolute masterpiece in the process. It’s not a flawless game by any means, but it’s one that manages to force players to question their own moral beliefs in a way few games dare to do without being preachy or pretentious while simultaneously having immensely entertaining gameplay and a consistently engaging narrative.

The very idea of creating a follow up to such a revolutionary title must have been incredibly intimidating. How does a developer continue such an open-ended story? How do they improve on gameplay which to this day still holds up surprisingly well? How can they possibly expect to match up to expectations when the bar is set so astronomically high?

Well Neil Druckmann returned as director for the sequel and shortly after the release of The Last of Us Remastered he and the rest of his team got to work. Over the course of the following six years the game would slowly take shape and while many ideas were pitched or tried out, the one constant throughout development were the themes of the game- hatred and revenge.

Announced at PSX in 2016, they showcased that Ellie would be the main protagonist this time around, with Joel concerned as she announces that she plans to kill every last member of some unfortunate group. Beautiful visuals, the return of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, dark tone, with that short video the hype train began pulling out of the station, but it was with the 2018 gameplay trailer that people got really excited. It’s a simple encounter involving stealth and combat, but it showcased so many new features like the melee system, gorgeous graphics, prone crawling under cars, and other stealth mechanics. I’ll go into that a bit later, but it’s safe to say this got a lot of people very excited.

From there the game had a few trailers and then some delays, but before we delve into the release it’s important that we mention two major events that occurred during the game’s development. First, it was reported that Naughty Dog allegedly kept its developers under a massive crunch schedule, with some employees working as long as 12-hour days. I want to make a couple of things clear. 

First and foremost, developer crunch is deplorable. I understand the desire of publishers to have a game release within a certain window, but overworking employees to the level that Naughty Dog did is never okay. I would rather a game be delayed for years than force developers into such terrible conditions. That being said, the crunch will not have any effect on my views on the game. 

Secondly, I should mention the script leaks that came out months prior to the game’s release. For those who don’t know, some of the script, cutscenes, and files from the game were leaked by a hacker, revealing some major plot details. Personally I managed to avoid spoilers before playing, but many who read them became irate with some of the decisions made. And while many of the leaks were different from the end product, the major plot points were accurate, though perhaps more importantly, devoid of context.

This led to some players cancelling pre-orders and when the game was released on June 19th 2020, it faced massive review bombs despite getting near universal praise from critics. It’s one of the largest gaps I’ve ever seen between user and critic scores, with some players going as far as to accuse them of being paid off or pandering for free games, which are clearly ridiculous, but popular enough to warrant a mention.

While some negative user reviews were written by people boycotting the game and many others were from people complaining about it being “too political” or catering to the “SJW agenda” (and believe me, we’ll get to that bullshit later), many genuinely disliked the game for their own reasons, something that didn’t seem to occur as often with professional critics.

So just like in my last video I intend to take an in-depth look at the entirety of this game, analyzing every last detail of the experience, sharing my opinions, and hopefully shedding some light on how and why this critic to player disconnect occurred. Of course that means the entire game will be spoiled going forward, so if you haven’t played it yet I implore you to give it a shot before watching. The video will still be here when you get back. With that said, let’s kick this thing off right at the beginning.

...Is what I would say if it weren’t for the title screen. Yes, yes, the boat and water graphics are gorgeous and all, but the real thing I want to mention is the vast array of accessibility options available to the player. From color blind modes to customizable difficulties allowing players to adjust a litany of factors to affect the experience it’s fantastic. I would have never thought about a lot of these inclusions without experiencing certain issues myself, so this game really is welcoming to everyone in just about every way imaginable. Just wanted to give this a quick bit of appreciation before hopping into the game itself. With that said…

    The game begins with a cutscene of Joel’s rampage from the end of the previous game and when it cuts away we see that he’s describing the events to Tommy, who agrees not to tell anyone. He visits Ellie, promising to teach her guitar and sings her Future Days by Pearl Jam, which is both a cute scene and solid foreshadowing given that when Ellie loses Joel, she definitely loses herself. These scenes have just the perfect mix of awkward friendship and parent-child bonding that one might expect from two people in their situation.

    Cut to four years later. We’re introduced to Ellie’s friend Jessie, whose ex-girlfriend Ellie kissed the night before. They meet up with said ex, Dina, and in the process get a good look at the state of civilization in the small town of Jackson. There’s electricity, order, and happy families everywhere and rather than worrying about basic needs like survival and food, Ellie’s main concerns of the day are her awkward patrol with Dina and the bigot from the previous night.

    Over the course of this video I’ll be bringing up some of the criticisms I’ve heard of the game and stating whether or not I believe them to be valid and hopefully sufficiently explaining why or why not. First, I’d like to point out that if you are someone who dislikes the game because it dares to showcase LGBT characters then I suggest you fuck off because you are not welcome here. 

With that out of the way I’ve heard some claim that this scene is problematic for numerous reasons, but the main criticism is that this doesn’t go “far enough” to showcase the struggles of the LGBT community, since this is the only scene where Ellie’s homosexuality is really relevant outside of her relationship with Dina and without a doubt that argument is absolutely ridiculous. 

The Last of Us Part 2 is not about Ellie’s struggles as a lesbian. It is about her journey as a character and her sexual orientation has nothing to do with it. Not every story featuring an LGBT character needs to be about their sexuality unless you somehow believe that these individuals are entirely defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity. They are their own people, able to live their own lives and experience their own stories and if you limit their representation to such a narrow topic you are, in turn, limiting how often they can be represented in pop culture. 

Anyway after meeting up with Dina there’s a quick snowball fight with the kids to teach basic shooting mechanics as well as the ability to quick throw objects at nearby targets with a single button press, which goes a long way to making combat more fluid and fast-paced when charging an enemy, especially since like in the first game, some enemies are able to be taken down in a single hit when stunned. After the fight the girls begin their patrol and the game shifts to the perspective of a new character, Abby.

    She wakes up from a nightmare in a cabin surrounded by friends. One, Owen, is waiting at the window and asks her to follow him outside. They take a short trip and eventually see the town of Jackson, apparently looking for someone. Owen is worried about going into the town since his girlfriend Mel is pregnant, but Abby is determined, saying she’d even go so far as to force information out of a guard to learn about their target.

    The two argue until Owen leaves and Abby continues towards the guard tower, giving us a chance to learn the basics of the much-improved melee combat. In this game, melee has a much better flow due in part to the much smoother animations, but also because players now have to time their dodges with a button press instead of waiting for a prompt to appear on-screen. This allows for brawls to feel more natural and dynamic, plus the environmental finishers are much more elaborate and brutal than before, which is really fun to see.

    Abby also gets a gun, uses listen mode, and learns the basics of movement. This game allows players to drop prone in addition to crouching, which is good for slower, but quieter stealth while also allowing them to crawl under obstacles to hide. It gives the player another option to work with when sneaking around, which is both useful and adds variety to those types of encounters. Shooting is similar to the first game, but I never had any issues with the auto-aim like before and weapons all seem to have more impact when fired.

Listen mode went through a pretty big change though. It doesn’t actually show a full character silhouette anymore, instead being an amalgamous mass that becomes more or less clear as the target gets closer or further away. This feels more realistic as a depiction of listening closely to the environment and makes stealth more tense by adding a little more uncertainty into the mix.

Now obviously the graphics got a big upgrade, but in this section it actually has some gameplay utility as well, with players able to see the footprints of the infected as they walk around. It’s a small detail, but a cool little touch. Eventually Abby finds a pair of horse tracks and decides to follow them.

    We switch back to Ellie and Dina who bond while going to various lookouts and clearing infected. The systematic nature of this process shows just how in-control of the situation Jackson County seems to be. Controlling the horses is much easier now, with less stiff controls which is great because there’s a lot of horseback riding in this game. Dina takes Ellie to a balcony where the two take in the sights and it’s damn pretty. The details in these massive environments are breathtaking to see and show just how far graphics have come in the past 7 years.

The infected are treated more like an annoyance than a threat, like vermin that need to be taken care of. They fill out log books just detailing the events that took place on patrol, and even brag about how many infected they’ve taken out in a single trip. There are a few more stealth sections, Ellie eventually finds weapon parts, pills, and crafting ingredients which the game explains, and she even has her knife from the first game, meaning craftable shivs are a thing of the past.

This can be good and bad. It does make this half of the game a bit less reliant on resources for survival, but also increases the game’s pacing quite a bit since there’s less fumbling around and more straight-up stealth. It also allows the game designers to make stealth encounters much broader and more complex since players have a quick means to dispatch enemies and can use resources on other craftable items instead. I personally see it as a net positive, but not by much.

We also find the first optional puzzle in the game. This time around, safes are opened by finding the combination in the environment either in an artifact or just hidden in plain sight. This one simply requires the player to find a note hinting that the combination is when “good boy” became employee of the month. Find the month with a dog in the frame right up on the wall and while I’m sure that the day was around somewhere I just entered days until I got the solution.

    It’s a simple, but a nice way to keep things varied, contrast the otherwise unending tension of the gameplay, and make great use of the environmental design, which wouldn’t be possible without the game’s impressive high-fidelity graphics. I won’t be covering puzzles in depth since they’re such a small part of the game, but I do appreciate that they’re entertaining for those who give them a shot and most are skippable if they’re not your cup of tea. I do wish that Ellie just instantly entered codes when the player found one in an artifact and some of them could have had a bit more challenge, but aside from that it’s an awesome addition to the game that adds more to do in the downtime between combat encounters.

The two come into contact with spores and both put on their gas masks, showing the Ellie’s still hiding her immunity from others. Eventually Ellie and Dina fall through the floor and come face to face with the first clicker. For new players, the scene uses effective context clues to show that it’s blind by having it stop to use echolocation right as it runs up, something it also does when walking around.

The women make their way through a room of both normal infected and clickers, showcasing the powerful combo they make while upping the challenge a little, much like in the first game. Ellie also gets to use bottles, bricks, and molotovs here, but they’re pretty much identical to the first game, even if the effects look a lot better.

They leave by utilizing a nearby rope, allowing the game to teach the player how the impressive rope physics work, with players able to grab and toss it anywhere they like to climb. It might have been cool to see this work in other ways, such as grappling, springing traps, or finding a permanent rope to be used in puzzles, but as is the tech is really impressive and the swinging works well enough.

We also find the first workbench here. Unlike the first game, this time all of a weapon’s upgrades are present at the start, with each type of upgrade occurring once. It’s an effective change because it gives each upgrade a lot more weight, with each one having a significant impact on the weapon’s effectiveness. Plus the freedom allows players to attune their arsenal to their personal playstyle, the perfect way to modernize the old system.

After, the two stumble into the stash house of a now-dead Jackson resident Eugine, finding his massive indoor pot farm and VHS porn (with one having the hilarious title Smash Brandy’s Cooch). The two get high and flirt, with Ellie even revealing her immunity to Dina, which she doesn’t believe, before having sex as the camera fades.

    We switch back to Abby once again, encountering and running away from a horde of infected. It’s not only a great set piece, but also a subtle lesson teaching the player that avoiding combat is always a viable option. As she’s on the verge of defeat, Joel and Tommy come to her rescue, which makes sense since Abby was following their tracks. They run away together, fighting off a massive horde before reaching a cabin. There’s also a pipe here for use as a melee weapon, but they work pretty much identically to the first game so there’s not much to talk about. They all share names and Abby suggests they take the horses and ride to her friends’ cabin since it’s fenced in. The group escapes and we’re back to Ellie and Dina.

The girls are just having some pillow talk and while it is cute, I also want to mention the attention to detail here with the women having unshaved armpits. It’s a tiny thing, but it makes absolute sense in a post-apocalyptic world where even the quarantine zones have a limited food supply and it’s something a lot of game developers wouldn’t have done for fear of some sort of weird backlash.

    Jessie comes looking for them and discovers them getting dressed before mentioning that Tommy and Joel never showed up to the lookout. The three split up to search and we jump to Abby again who leads Joel and Tommy to her friends’ cabin. Safe from the horde, they meet the group and Tommy offers to let them resupply back in Jackson, but upon hearing Joel’s name the group reacts strangely before Abby reveals that she knows who Joel is and shoots him in the knee with a shotgun.

    Her friends restrain Tommy before knocking him out and Joel tells her to just finish the job, but she grabs a nearby golf club and tells Joel that he doesn’t get to rush whatever’s coming and the scene cuts to black as she takes her first swing.

Alright, now a lot of people who played this game have probably seen a bunch of Joel-in-one memes and such, but I’ve seen a lot of people genuinely criticizing this scene saying that Joel would never blindly trust a stranger so readily and he’d never be taken off guard like that, calling it completely out of character but I think that’s absolutely ridiculous. 

For one, Joel seemed to trust Sam and Henry pretty quick despite them holding him at gunpoint, so it’s completely within his character to be trusting now. Also, Joel isn’t super human, and given that they were on the run from a horde in the middle of a blizzard it makes sense that they’d take shelter anywhere they could find. Plus they even added the little touch of Joel screaming out to Tommy after getting shot, not for help, but wanting to make sure his brother was okay. If anything, I’d say this scene nailed Joel’s characterization.

Even if you want to say that the old Joel would never have trusted these people, he may have become more relaxed over time having lived in a sheltered, peaceful community for years. Random attacks in the previous game were largely centered around supplies and food from scavengers, so they’ve probably been less of an issue since he can always offer to bring people to Jackson for those very things. The town had 40 residents in the first game, so now with its population clearly being much larger it’s easy to assume that Joel’s gotten used to meeting and welcoming new people.

Joel isn’t perfect, he isn’t clairvoyant, he’s just a guy and while I know it hurts to see him taken out so ruthlessly, calling this uncharacteristic is just short-sighted and comes off as being bitter about his death to the point of making up reasons to be angry about it more than an actual legitimate criticism.

Afterwards, perspective shifts back to Ellie as she reaches the cabin. She sneaks in, but despite slicing up one guy’s face, she’s held down by three of Abby’s friends. She begs Joel to get up, begs Abby not to kill him, but Owen tells her to end things since Ellie may be a sign that the town is looking for them. Abby lifts her club and the music fades out just as she delivers the final blow.

The group argues about whether they should kill Ellie and Tommy, but Owen stops one of them before two-face kicks her in the head and knocks her out. She’s woken up by Dina, who calls to Jessie and the two take her and Tommy back to town.

Now I understand why people are upset about this decision, but I cannot condone those saying it somehow makes the game worse. Some have said this is false advertising, but there was never an ad that stated Joel would be Ellie’s main companion throughout the game. There were misleading ads and trailers, but nothing more egregious than the Infinity War trailers changing the gems in Thanos’s gauntlet. Some have said this tarnishes Joel’s legacy or disrespects him as a character to be cheaply tossed to the side and that is, once again, ridiculous.

The driving force behind both Ellie and Abby’s stories is the aftermath of Joel’s death. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of another tragic death I’ve seen in media- Eddard Stark from Game of Thrones. Yes, it hurts to see characters we’ve grown attached to die, especially in such a shocking, sudden, disturbing, and degrading way, but Joel’s killed so many people that this death feels completely deserved and it’s the catalyst for everything we experience afterward. 

Killing off a main character is something that needs to have major repercussions. It needs to be a moment that makes sense in the story and is something remembered by both the other characters and the player for the rest of the game. It needs to be done for more than shock value and needs to make way for another story line to bloom in its wake. I believe that all of this applies to Joel’s death and I hope that as we continue I can adequately explain why.

Later on, Tommy visits Ellie and they discuss hunting down Abby. Tommy saw the patches on their jackets identifying them as members of the Washing Liberation Front, a group operating out of Seattle. Tommy asks Ellie for an extra day to convince Maria to give them more help, since the number of people needed to safely go after Abby’s group would leave Jackson vulnerable to attack and she agrees.

The next day Ellie’s at Joel’s grave and Dina takes her to explore his house. It’s really interesting as well as heartbreaking to see how much of an established life he made in Jackson. Taking up woodworking, having the framed picture of Sarah from the first game, books showing his interests and his attempts to learn more about Ellie’s interests, his old broken watch, it feels like the developers’ way of helping players cope with his death and acts as a solid moment of peace before the game picks back up. Ellie even goes into his closet and holds his jacket before smelling it, to have even the slightest connection to Joel just one more time.

Downstairs the girls are met by Maria, furiously reading a letter from Tommy in which he says he went after Abby alone. She relents to giving Ellie and Dina guns and a horse to go after him and the two head out towards Seattle, ending the first act.

We cut to Seattle weeks later, with Ellie and Dina on horseback in a beautifully crafted environment. Say what you will about the game as a whole, but no one can deny it’s one of the most visually impressive games of the generation. The environments, lighting, facial animation, fluidity in dynamic movement, they’re so good it makes the relatively average hair stand out as a little ugly by comparison. Absolutely stunning.

The girls have clearly bonded over their trip, becoming closer as a couple as well. We get a bit of scavenging, some chit chat, and a gate puzzle showing off some more of those fancy rope physics when the player tosses an extension cord around.

Much like in the first game I think having this kind of down time gives some good breathing room before hopping back into the action. The variety is necessary to effectively generate tension and ensure the player isn’t numbed by a constant need to be on edge and it’s something The Last of Us 2 understands at a fundamental level.

The two find a map of the city and reach a gate marked with the words” fuck FEDRA” something that eventually just humorously becomes the fuck FEDRA gate over time, which is a cute touch with some clever writing naturally emulating how two people would really create a silly inside joke. They think it leads to the WLF headquarters, but the generator to open it is out of gas. After hopping over some barricades with the horse to find some we’re introduced to a really cool section of the game. 

An open chunk of the city to explore with only the map to guide us, riding horseback from place to place and finding a bunch of little nooks and crannies to check out. There are some obvious places to explore that Ellie and Dina mark on the map, but aside from that it’s a small sandbox contained entirely within this section of the game. Plus, players have to use a real map and look at street signs to get around, with the girls marking off different places as they’re explored. It’s really immersive and great to avoid cluttering up the screen with waypoint markers.

Players who want to find every collectible and solve every puzzle will have plenty to do here, with some puzzles requiring them to go to different areas of the map entirely to reach the location of a safe or open a locked door with a certain key. Expository dialogue and notes explaining how the WLF fought off the FEDRA forces and their totalitarian rule over the city can be missed, entire encounters can be skipped, and even this cute scene with Ellie playing a cover of Aha’s Take On Me is completely optional, giving more engaging and entertaining content to those who search for it, but being entirely avoidable for others who just want to continue the main story. It’s probably my favorite part of the entire playthrough and it’s a shame that this is the only open-exploration section in the game.

If you follow the map to the first marker it leads to a solid example of a dynamic combat encounter. Here, players can try to sneak by the infected through the tall grass, fight their way past them, or just do what I did and fail at stealth before booking it up the ladder where the infected can’t follow. I won’t be going into detail on every encounter, but just know that most of them throughout the game have numerous approaches like this.

From here we enter a temple where Dina explains certain concepts foreign to Ellie as she was raised Jewish. The gas tank inside is empty, so they just explore before deciding to head elsewhere.

As I said before, the game’s not perfect, so here’s a weird glitch I experienced where the cabinet didn’t open despite the characters performing the animation. It’s not too bad, I just think it’s funny. Plus this kind of glitch only happened to me twice in the playthrough, which is a massive improvement over the numerous times it occurred in the first game.

Upon leaving as far as I can tell there’s only one other location required to visit before heading back to the gate, the courthouse. Make it past some infected, get into the parking garage, find the gas and get out. Personally this place was really tense for me because I completely ran out of ammo before finishing up, so I had to lead the infected to another corner of the lot before sneaking back, getting the gas, and getting out. It’s kinda funny that they didn’t hear this loud ass gate as we left, but still made for a tense moment.

    With gas in hand, the duo makes it back to the fuck FEDRA gate and open it, making their way through a building to find two wolves that Tommy tortured for information by separating them, asking each questions, and punishing them if their answers didn’t match up. It’s a brutal technique Ellie explains to Dina, having learned it from Joel. They learn that one of the men was present at his murder.

    After they leave, a mine explodes and Ellie is captured, with Dina escaping. She wakes up in a school and sees two wolves, including the man whose face she cut open at the cabin and he’s holding a bit of a grudge. The two wolves debate whether to kill her and just before one does, cue Dina-ex-machina as she comes to the rescue before falling through the ceiling. The other wolf tries to strangle her, but as the two fight, Ellie frees herself from the ropes, kills her attacker, and takes his letter letting them know that another of Abby’s friends, Leah, should be at the TV station.

    They escape the school and on the way to the station there are a lot of free roaming encounters that the player can stumble upon. Random wolves patrolling the city that can be stealthily taken out, fought off, or avoided entirely. Some are triggered by entering an area, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t some that dynamically pop up around the map. While the game does begin to narrow its options for exploration from here on out, becoming more like the first game, these encounters make that transition feel much more natural gameplay-wise.

    Plus it gives me a chance to talk about the human enemies this time around. While the first game’s AI was decent, here the enemies can feel really intimidating. They flank around corners, determine whether to hide or push on the fly, and even have the added benefit of yelling out their partners’ names when they’re killed. It may be a bit gimmicky, but it gives each NPC a sense of personality and drives home the fact that Ellie is killing a ton of people just to get back at Abby. There are a couple flaws with the AI’s design too, but I’ll bring those up later.

    The allies are also more helpful in this game. Not only do they actually help out a lot in combat and stealth, but I only noticed one time an ally stepped into an enemy’s line of sight, which is great to see. The worry many had with the first game was that it would feel like babysitting, but instead it could sometimes feel like the companion wasn’t even there. Here, they’re welcome when they’re around and missed when they’re not. A fantastic refinement of their AI.

    Eventually the two make it to a bunch of tripwires with infected around. It’s kinda cool, but never really evolves into anything challenging since the number of infected is pretty low and getting through isn’t exactly a brain teaser. It might be the only moment in this game that feels like it was put in solely because it was in the first game and once again I’ll say that it would have been cool to see these throughout the game, but they aren’t a bad addition so overall it’s just a little, if unnecessary callback. Although this is the first time I’ve seen a runner with its legs blown off crawling after me, which did a good job of keeping me on my toes. 

As they continue, they see graffiti of a woman, worshiped by a cult-sounding group before finding their dead horse. Dina throws up, seemingly because of the smell, but it’s clearly meant to foreshadow her pregnancy. After a few more tripwires they reach the hospital, and these are the kinds of moments where this game innovates over the first.

In my last video, I mentioned how the need to move ladders, planks, and palettes around was an exercise in tedium, but here the game fills those moments and other non-combat sections like this with dialogue between the two characters, going a long way to keep the game engaging while also adding to the immersion since most of these interactions are dynamic and feel natural. Not to mention the rarity of time-wasters in general making this even better.

The hospital is a bloodbath, full of dead wolves with some hanging from the ceiling. It’s a gruesome sight to behold, with Ellie and Dina eventually finding Leah’s corpse with arrows in her chest. Through looting her body they find a set of pictures from along the trip to hunt down Joel, with many of the friends smiling and laughing like it’s a road trip. 

Now, we learn later that they never really expected to find Joel and thought they were just chasing a dead lead, but to Ellie they’re a bunch of monsters revelling in their murderous plot. And honestly, this almost feels out of character for Abby’s friends given what we find out later. They had a lot of internal tension about the plan and I just don’t see them taking road trip pictures like this. It’s a minor problem, but I’d say the writers went a little too far in trying to demonize the group.

This is also where I found the stealth training manual. In this game, rather than giving instant ability upgrades, training manuals unlock new branches in the skills menu to be unlocked with pills. This one in particular is a god send since it allows players to craft a silencer for the pistol. Not only is this an incredibly useful tool during stealth for obvious reasons, but it gives more purpose to the revolver because in addition to the two guns feeling more unique when shot in terms of impact and recoil, it also works as a solid alternative to shoot without needing to remove the silencer on the pistol since silencers have a limited number of uses, thereby improving both game feel and gameplay utility for these weapons.

Reinforcements soon arrive, forcing the girls to fight their way out of the station, going into a subway tunnel underneath in a terrifying yet gorgeously lit set piece. This red light pierces through the tunnel in a blinding, but stunning way. Here the player can even use the clickers nearby to distract the wolves like in the first game’s Left Behind DLC, something that becomes a common tactic as the game goes on. 

Eventually they come across this game’s new infected- the shambler. Sort of like a mini-bloater, this thing is incredibly tough but weak to fire and has the ability to fart out spore clouds that deal damage over time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that Ellie takes damage from the spores, but it’s easy enough to assume any gas in that high of a concentration probably isn’t healthy to breathe.

Making it past the shambler leads to a cutscene in which Ellie’s mask is damaged in a spore-filled tunnel by an infected attack and she has to force Dina to keep her mask on, proving that she told the truth earlier about being immune. It’s little moments like this that demonstrate how close Dina and Ellie have become, with Dina being willing to sacrifice herself for Ellie’s sake.

Following this a mob of infected come barreling through the station in a chase sequence reminiscent of the one in Train to Busan. I can’t say for sure that it’s an homage, but if so it’s very well done. They make it to an abandoned theater and after Ellie explains her immunity Dina reveals that she’s pregnant with Jessie’s baby, having known since shortly after leaving Jackson. This prompts a really good moment of dialogue between the two.

This is peak character writing. Ellie’s words must be painful for Dina to hear, but we know Ellie only said that because she’s upset with Dina for coming and putting herself at risk in that state. It’s a very human mixing up of words, and we know the two understand and care about each other enough to not take the moment personally. It’s tense, but not the kind of thing to drive a wedge between them. Ellie scavenges around the theater, turns on the power, and finds a guitar. Upon playing, we’re sent into a flashback with Joel in the woods.

    The two go on a casual stroll ending at a science museum for Ellie’s birthday surprise. There are some cute bonding moments and the sequence lends a bit of insight into their lives after the first game while also being incredibly cute. They explore the dinosaur exhibit before finally reaching the space shuttle.

    Joel gives Ellie a cassette tape as they climb in and as she listens to it play the countdown sequence to a shuttle launch the screen begins to shake and the visuals become an abstract view of a launch sequence. It’s a bit cheesy for my taste, especially in a story as grounded as The Last of Us, with it being the only part of the game with this level of abstraction, but given that this is Ellie’s recollection of events I’m willing to let it slide as an exaggerated remembrance of a happy memory with Joel, especially since this kind of this was done in the DLC and it makes for a heartwarming scene.

    Following this the two get seperated and Ellie makes her way through a few exhibits with corpses and text on the wall describing the atrocities that took place here. We also get the return of needing to fix the flashlight when it goes out by slapping the controller, a mechanic that’s not necessarily bad, but much like in the first game it’s still unnecessary and gimmicky.

She makes her way over a door and dodges a frightened boar before reconnecting with Joel. The two notice a firefly symbol on the wall with the word ‘Liars’ underneath, foreshadowing Ellie’s eventual questioning of Joel’s actions in the first game. Given the notes found around the area elaborating on the graffiti, it also shows the repercussions of Joel’s actions, with those at the museum waiting on the firefly vaccine only for nothing to come.

We go back to the present and Ellie wakes up on Day 2. She finds Dina upstairs with a fixed radio and a map showing the locations of some of their targets. By listening to the radio chatter she learned that Owen, the character that introduced Abby to Jackson at the beginning of the game, has gone awol and that someone not with a group called the ‘Scars’, but rather a man acting on his own is in district 14 with a sniper rifle. They realize it must be Tommy and Ellie tells Dina to stay behind as she leaves to find him.

The game cuts to Hillcrest, near district 14. It’s kind of odd that Ellie didn’t have any trouble getting here considering how every step further into wolf territory has been met with obstacles so far (and the game does this a few more times before the end), but I guess it’s just one of those things done for story convenience to avoid repetition and drawing things out, like how Joel and Ellie made it from Pennsylvania to Wyoming on foot without any problems in the first game.

She comes across a combat encounter where we’re introduced to dogs. They can smell Ellie’s scent if they find it, with listen mode being a clever way to visualize the scent trail it’s tracking, so getting them out of the way is crucial to success. And yeah, it can be tough to watch at times with the dogs even having their own take down animations with Ellie’s various melee weapons.

Ellie makes her way to a garage and gets her hands on the bow, which works similarly to the first game, but this time the game actually explains that headshots prevent arrows from breaking. Right after there’s a neighborhood packed with wolf soldiers to try it out on. And this section is a great example of how open the combat areas are this time around.

Rather than just dotting these places with random bits of cover, these places have been crafted to allow for maximum flexibility in how a player wants to approach a given situation. There’s the new feature of hiding in tall grass or foliage to sneak around, using bottles and bricks to distract enemies and sneak around like before, little nooks and crannies that enable sneaking between buildings, glass and other loud objects lying around that cause the player to make noise, increased verticality giving enemies difficult spots to reach and players solid vantage points, it all combines to make for a much more versatile and varied gameplay experience than the first game.

This versatility also allows players to create self-imposed mini-objectives throughout each encounter. Some rooms might be locked, making the player decide whether to avoid them, try to get in before clearing the area, or trying to sneak around everyone to make it inside before getting caught, meaning those long sections of running through an empty area post-encounter are much more rare.

It’s a fantastic stealth system that allows the player to use a multitude of different methods to achieve their goals while also ensuring that no two players have the same gameplay experience. Stealth or combat? Patience or speed? Hell, you could always try to sneak by combat encounters entirely but then you lose out on some precious loot. It’s all a give and take in a much more inviting, yet also more difficult way than ever before.

Once the wolves are dealt with, Ellie jumps down to an abandoned house and gets caught by… Jessie?! He explains that he came looking for her and Dina right after they left, heading over to the sniper fire in the hopes of finding them. They decide they need to get away as soon as possible and they decide on using a nearby truck to do so.

As Jessie hotwires and drives off, Ellie takes care of the wolves and infected swarming the car in a fun action set piece until a clicker hops onto the hood causing Jessie to drive them into a lake. They swim to shore and return to the theater where Dina gives Jessie a warm welcome, despite not telling him about her pregnancy and as Ellie gives them some time to catch up we transition to another flashback.

Ellie and Tommy are out on patrol, with him letting Ellie take out a few infected with his sniper rifle. They return to the lookout where Joel's waiting. He mentions that Ellie needs new strings for her guitar and the two agree to sweep a nearby music store while looking for strings while Tommy holds down the fort.

On the ride over they discuss Ellie’s role in the partols, with Joel agreeing to recommend her for them if she sticks to the shorter routes at first. It really emphasizes how he truly sees himself as her father figure, though Ellie seems a bit apprehensive. It’s an interesting role reversal from the first game, with Ellie now having doubts about trusting Joel combined with the typical desire for independence that comes in the late teens.

This is all implied by the voice actors’ performances and the dialogue itself. Joel attempting to relate to Ellie more by reading the Savage Starlight comics, Ellie rejecting Joel’s offer to boost her up to a platform and preferring to climb herself, they’re more of those little story moments that are just so telling about the characters’ perspectives.

They decide to cut through a hotel and find some clickers and runners they need to fight off, with a bloater bursting through the wall as they sneak through starting the game’s first boss fight. I think putting combat encounters with less room for stealth in the flashbacks is a great decision because it allows players to utilize their entire arsenal without needing to worry about being low on supplies later. It allows the game to keep those all-out assault moments without feeling like a cheap way to drain the player’s supplies.

Now normally I’d say that reusing the bloater for a boss fight is lazy and cheap, but in actuality this is a great way to introduce their new abilities in this game. For one, bloaters now have the ability to charge forward, making them much more dangerous as they can trap the player between their thrown spore clouds and their massive attacks. To compensate for this, players can dodge their attacks like with other enemies.

On top of that, bloaters also have the new ability to charge through walls and other obstacles. Cover is the one saving grace players have when dodging these monsters, meaning that the longer fights go on, the more dangerous the area becomes. Throw in the runners in a second phase for good measure and you have a massively intimidating combination that makes the bloater scarier than ever before.

With that mess taken care of, they continue on their way through the hotel. They soon find the bodies of two Jackson residents who left the town to go try and help others. They were bit and one killed the other to avoid turning, but couldn’t do the same for themself. Reading their suicide note motivates Ellie to bring up the events at the hospital.

We learn that she’s slowly starting to piece things together. Asking Joel why they’ve never met another immune person before despite him saying there were dozens, why he took her out of the hospital without allowing her to ask them questions first. Joel triples down on his lie, doing his best to gaslight Ellie while also assuring her that none of this is because of a lack of trying and that nothing could have saved these people before the two head back to the lookout.

This is a wonderful scene that really showcases how Ellie still has that survivor’s guilt, due in part to the pieces of Joel’s story not adding up. We see how Joel likely feels guilty as well, both for making these deaths more likely and lying to Ellie, hell, even the fight against the bloater might have been avoidable if Ellie’s operation had actually resulted in a vaccine, but we also see his resolve in ensuring she never learns the truth, likely so she won’t go looking for someone else to do the surgery. It’s heartbreaking and getting these bits and pieces through short flashback sequences shows how the seeds of distrust were sowed over time, making it all the more tragic to experience.

We jump back to the present where Dina helps Ellie stitch her wounds before telling her about one of Abby’s friends, Nora, being in the hospital. Ellie immediately heads out despite Dina’s objections, barely holding on to the facade of searching for Tommy while clearly just after Abby for revenge.

On the way to the hospital there are a few infected alongside this really cool puzzle. Players have to bust open a couple of glass panels, opening a bar to use this rope to swing between two sides of a broken door. It’s nothing mind-bending, but it’s the best application of the rope mechanics in the game and a clever way to get players to use everything they’ve learned about the game’s mechanics thus far… Even if there are a few issues… 

This area also contained a few clickers, being the only place I actually used the trap mine. These replace the nail bombs from the first game and operate identically, but without the ability to be thrown. It’s kind of a weird change, making them difficult to use in combat, so much like the returning smoke bombs I rarely used them outside of major infected encounters. I’m sure that these are more useful on higher difficulties and in speed runs, but for my playstyle I found them pretty useless.

Further along while scouring the city for supplies I found a workbench, but right in the middle of picking a weapon upgrade I got one of the best surprises in the game- a wolf grabs Ellie from behind and starts a combat encounter. This was fucking terrifying and the perfect way to ensure I was on my toes for the rest of the game. It’s amazing how such a little subversion of what the player deems as a safe location can completely change their mindset from then on out.

It may have been more impressive if this were a naturally occurring event, maybe if the player doesn’t clear a house before searching or if it could occur somewhere else, but even for a one-time event it’s a really cool set piece.

    Soon after we reach an office complex full of the new and improved stalkers. Their AI is much improved, pretty much always having them hide around corners to ambush and being difficult to lure out to a hallway. They also like to attack in groups and can even flank the player, making them extremely deadly if you’re not paying attention. Not only are they far more abundant than before, but they’re eventually combined with clickers and runners to make for a really challenging combination.

    Plus their noises are creepy as all hell. The sound design in the first game was unnerving, but here it’s absolutely terrifying. The different infected make different noises and all of them sound like people being tortured with every negative emotion one can imagine. Overall the infected encounters in this game are more challenging tactically and have much better presentation on all fronts, with no two battles feeling the same.

Afterwards, Ellie’s tackled into a river by a stalker before reaching a sewer. There’s another jump scare with a clicker bursting out of the wall to attack, something that occasionally happens for the remainder of the game. In addition to being another means of keeping players on their toes and a great way to shake up stealth sections, it’s a great callback to when Ellie begged the clicker not to come to life in the Left Behind DLC.

She makes her way through the sewer and comes out pretty close to the hospital, making her way through the woods before hearing a whistling noise and being shot with an arrow. Arrows deal bleed damage over time, but it was never something that actually became an issue while playing. That said this encounter is really tense, with these new enemies having this creepy whistling language to communicate.

I’ve heard some say that the whistling makes them easier to kill since they’re easy to find, even without listen mode, but much to the contrary. The scars use whistles to communicate and ensure that the others are alright, so after the player takes one out, it’s only a matter of time before the others don’t hear a whistle back and investigate. Plus, it disguises their communications with one another so the player doesn’t immediately know their plan from what they say like with the wolves. I think it’s a neat way to add more variety to human enemies without just making them armored bullet sponges or something.

Later, Ellie comes upon some scars hanging a man in the woods, beginning the sequence shown off in the gameplay trailer. Now, much like with the first game’s gameplay trailer I believe this to be a showcase of the features the devs intended to include, but over the course of two years had to make concessions and cut some aspects out.

The trailer does showcase new features like hiding in tall grass, hiding under cars and having enemies check under them, stealing melee weapons from defeated foes, enemies yelling out their allies’ names and calling you out to others, being able to remove an arrow after getting shot to stop bleeding, sneaking through tight spaces in the environment, the new melee combat, enemies begging for their lives after falling to their knees, and the graphics are pretty much on par with the final release. All of this being showcased this long before release shows how much time the team took to polish everything up.

That said, there were definitely some aspects that were either played up or scripted for the sake of the trailer. Enemies being able to drag Ellie out from under cars, pulling arrows off of dead bodies with real-time physics, and Ellie reacting to environmental damage when running are all absent from the final product.

Much like with the first game I assume the team wanted to add these in, but couldn’t implement the mechanics properly in time for release. Plus the features that actually made it into the game seem to be the ones with the biggest impact on gameplay. Much like with the first game, I have to commend Naughty Dog for managing to match their ambitions so well that when I played this section it felt nostalgic of the trailer.

After that parking garage encounter, Ellie swims her way towards the hospital, managing to sneak in and surprise a girl playing what appears to be Hotline Miami. She demands Nora’s location, but as soon as the woman tells her she tries to strike, only for Ellie to kill her instead. She sneaks her way through the hospital to reach the top floor, encountering a few guards along the way. 

    She makes her way through some air ducts and finds Nora, holding her at gunpoint to get Abby’s location. She remembers Ellie from the night at the cabin, saying that Joel got what he deserved before smacking Ellie over the head with a bedpan and running away. This leads to a really tense, well-paced, and excellently fluid chase sequence before Ellie reaches her and holds her hostage before dragging the two of them down a hole into a spore-filled basement.

    Nora runs off yet again and after taking out the guards, Ellie finds Nora coughing and wheezing at the end of a hallway bathed in red light. At first she’s surprised that Ellie’s breathing the spores, but soon realizes who she is, prompting Ellies to ask if she’s a firefly. Nora responds that there are no more fireflies, something that should be surprising to Ellie given what she was told by Joel, but isn’t. A solid indicator that before his death she learned the truth about his secret as we’ll find out later.

    Nora refuses to give up Abby’s location, so Ellie takes her lead pipe and stares at her with a look of anger and hesitation before the melee prompt appears and the camera stays focused on her face as the player takes three strikes before the scene cuts to black. Now, some people have criticized this game for forcing the player to commit acts of violence or just being too violent in general. Calling out scenes like this, the killing of dogs, and others for being pointlessly brutal and I once again have no idea how someone could see this as a legitimate criticism.

    Putting aside the explicit scenes of torture and the sequence where you escape from a cannibalistic pedophile in the first game, let’s judge the value these scenes and graphic depictions of violence add to this game on its own merits. First, this is an M-rated game. It is made for adults. Much like with Tarantino movies or Call of Duty games, you go in knowing that there will be some level of violence. At least here, unlike with so many other games, the player is forced to see the repercussions of that violence and the effect it has on others instead of just giving them a kill streak. And that’s not me ragging on shooters, just saying that at least the violence in this game adds something to the story.

Ellie clearly doesn’t want to do this. The look on her face and hesitation beforehand is enough to prove that. It shows how having a single-minded focus on revenge above all else can lead someone down a violent road with a snowball effect that’s difficult to stop. On top of that, the realistic depictions of violence emphasize how much damage Ellie is doing to these people. People who have their own stories, people like Joel, or Abby’s father, or anyone else. And in the next scene she’s back at the theater with her hands still shaking, taking off her shirt to reveal a back covered in scars and bruises, and a vacant expression in her eyes as she looks close to tears we see how much damage she’s doing to herself.

It’s nothing really new or innovative to have characters experience trauma from the violence they or others have committed. And it’s definitely nothing new to have characters commit acts of violence to achieve an end goal. So I fail to see why this game in particular has so many people clutching their pearls and wagging their fingers as though it’s crossing some sort of imaginary line just because the player has to hit a button prompt. If it makes you uncomfortable, that’s fine, but it is in no way a flaw with the game.

Ellie tells Jessie and Dina that Abby is in the aquarium. Dina washes her wounds and tries to comfort her while Ellie mentions her fear of losing her. It’s clear that the events made her question her resolve, which is when we cut to another flashback two years earlier.

Ellie walks the halls of Saint Mary’s Hospital, finding it abandoned before locating a tape recorder. Outside, she listens to it on repeat. It’s a recording of one of the fireflies mentioning that they would likely never find another immune person and how Joel killed the surgeon, the one person who could develop the vaccine.

Just then Joel appears and gives her a hug, asking why she ran off. It’s a little weird that he didn’t piece things together since he’s at the hospital, but Ellie pushes him away, demanding he tell her the truth about the fireflies, saying she’ll only return to Jackson if he does. He contemplates for a moment before telling her the truth.

This scene is perfect. Perfectly performed, perfectly written, perfectly scored, and put at the perfect place in the story. Not only does it show a heartbreaking moment where Ellie finally learns the truth, completely unable to change anything and finding out that the person she trusts the most lied to her for years, but also that anyone else she knew who died from the infection could have potentially been saved if it weren’t for Joel. All of her lost hope, survivor’s guilt, and loneliness come rushing back to her at once.

At the same time, Joel is forced to do the one thing he had so much trouble with in the first game- confront the consequences of his actions and how they affect the people in his life. Like Ellie, he knows there’s no turning back. He has to see the anguish Ellie’s experiencing because of what he did for her sake while knowing he’s the last person who could do anything to help her. Whether you sympathize with Joel or think he got what he deserved is up to you, but it’s a very human character moment that I’m sure many of us can relate to.

On top of all of that, this adds some mystery to the story as well. It makes the player ask why, if she was so furious with Joel, is she fighting so hard to avenge his death? Later on we’ll understand more, but for now the player knows things don’t add up and a piece of this puzzle is still missing, keeping them engaged in both the present and future at the same time.

    Seattle day 3: Ellie wakes up the next day and runs through the theater to find Jessie looking after a sleeping Dina. She was sick the night before, prompting him to ask her if Dina’s pregnant, which Ellie confirms, likely thinking he’d know if she lied. He tries to convince her to go back to Jackson, but Ellie continues to use the same excuse that she needs to find Tommy before leaving. Jessie says he can’t take Dina back because she won’t leave without Ellie, agreeing to go with Ellie to search for Tommy.

    They go through the city, scavenging and killing wolves before locating a boat before overhearing two wolves discussing the soldiers sent after a sniper at the marina who’s not affiliated with the scars. They climb up to a balcony and while Jessie wants to go to the marina to save Tommy from the incoming wolves, Ellie’s adamant that they steal a boat to get to the aquarium to find him since he’ll be headed that way. They argue for a bit before Jessie leaves on his own. She kills the wolves nearby in a challenging, but cool encounter utilizing the water for stealth, steals the boat, and makes her way toward the aquarium.

The boat section is mostly linear, but allows players to either head directly for Abby or scavenge. We take out some scars before reaching an arcade where in the middle of solving a puzzle the floor collapses, sending Ellie tumbling into a room with another bloater. This fight does feel a little like a copy-paste of the one before. While it should be more difficult due to the more open arena making it harder to dodge and Joel not being around to distract it, having access to Ellie’s full arsenal makes the entire fight a joke. I like the surprise that kicks the fight off and it’s still not a bad fight, but it certainly could have been more unique.

After, Ellie continues to pilot the boat toward the aquarium in a massive storm, eventually capsizing before swimming to shore. She sneaks inside, kills a dog in a cutscene, and comes upon two of Abby’s friends from the cabin- Owen and Mel. She holds them up, attempting to use Joel's interrogation technique to learn Abby’s location until Owen attacks, starting a fight that results in both of them dead. Ellie opens Mel’s jacket to search for information, but discovers that she was pregnant, sending her into a shock-induced panic attack. 

This is the moment where Ellie realizes what she’s done. How many people she’s killed, how similar she is to Abby for so many people. It’s not necessarily regret, but more a shift in perspective that reminds her of Dina and how her quest for revenge could result in the same happening to her. This is obviously just my own speculation, but I believe it’s backed up by her leaving with Tommy and Jessie when they come in right after before the camera pans down to the blood trail and Ellie’s map resting on the floor.

The next day Ellie wakes up on a couch with Dina and goes to discuss the route back to Jackson with Tommy and Jessie. She’s still mad that Abby gets to live, but accepts that it’s what’s best for everyone, especially Dina. Tommy goes to get packed up and Ellie apologizes to Jessie for not having her priorities straight. He accepts her apology just before the two hear sounds of a struggle at the entrance.

They rush for the door only for Jessie to be shot in the head and killed instantly. I’d say this was a sad moment, but honestly I was too shocked to be sad. Abby stands at the foyer, holding Tommy at gunpoint. She demands that Ellie surrender and toss away her weapon, to which Ellie complies. She begs Abby to spare Tommy, claiming to understand her reasoning behind Joel’s murder and offering herself in his place. Abby grits her teeth, points her gun at Ellie and chastises her for wasting the life spared by her and her friends back at the cabin when… the game goes black.

And now we get to the middle point of the story and easily the most contentious thing about The Last of Us Part 2. The next half of the game will largely be spent playing as Abby. This, along with Joel’s death, are the two main reasons some people have angrily given the game horrible reviews on sites like Metacritic. 

It’s a tough pill to swallow, not only playing as the character that you’ve been hunting this entire time, but one you’ve hunted because she killed the beloved main character from the first game. Not only that, but leaving the player on a cliffhanger beforehand. Personally, I think this decision was ballsy and pays off in full (though with a few asterisks), but I think it’s important to address one major controversy beforehand.

In an IGN interview back in 2018, director Neil Druckmann was quoted saying that Ellie was the only playable character in an offhand comment. Many have used this statement to add to their claims of false advertising mentioned earlier, which is complete nonsense. Had the game gone in a different direction and allowed players to play as Joel for half of the game I don’t think any of these fans would be complaining, meaning their complaints aren’t about the falsehoods, but rather about the content. 

More importantly, Ellie’s story is complete without Abby’s half. Nothing was removed from the game to make room for Abby so her inclusion is nothing but added value. Not to mention that this statement could have easily been taken out of context if he simply meant Joel wouldn’t be playable. Either way, players lose absolutely nothing from this statement, meaning it’s not false advertising. I could go on for days about how frustrating it is to hear the whining over these ridiculous arguments, but for now let’s just press onward and see how the game continues from here.

Hard cut to Abby, 4 years earlier looking for her dad in the woods. Along the way I found a state quarter, which is a fantastic way to let the player know they’re in for the long haul, considering they now have 50 new items to collect. Collectibles work very similarly to the first game, with the only exception being that instead of finding comics and firefly pendants, Ellie collects trading cards and Abby collects state quarters. They both also collect artifacts like before. 

There aren’t any unlockable costumes, which is a bummer, but there is concept art and  it does give the completionists out there something to look out for while exploring the world. I also like that Ellie collects cards of characters from the comics that Joel gave her and Abby collects coins like her dad. It’s a nice bit of symmetry and another small touch that lends a bit more to each character.

Abby finds her dad and the two begin to follow some tracks. They have some cute dialogue with him teasing her about her relationship with Owen, bonding over his goofy lessons, and eventually come upon a zebra stuck in some barbed wire. Owen comes in to help and the guys hold the zebra as Abby cuts the wires until it’s free. They chase the zebra over to a lake where we see Saint Mary’s hospital in the background.

Owen tells Jerry about Ellie showing up, calling him doc and saying that everyone is looking for him before the two head out. We cut to the inside of the hospital where we see that Jerry’s debating the ethics of killing Ellie with Marlene. She asks him what he’d do if it was his daughter when Abby walks in. Marlene reluctantly gives Jerry the go-ahead and Abby reassures her father that if she were in Ellie’s position, she’d want him to do the surgery.

Flash forward to Abby rushing through the hospital with alarms going off. She sprints past a hallway and reaches the operating room to find her father’s dead body as Owen desperately tries to comfort her. The emotion from Laura Bailey is spot on and absolutely heart-rending to hear. I’ve seen some people say that it’s difficult or even impossible for them to sympathize with Abby after what she did, but I can’t understand how that’s possible after watching this scene and seeing all of the damage Ellie caused. I know it’s a subjective matter, but it really makes me think that somehow the point of the game went right over their heads, but we’ll come back to that later.

The camera zooms in on her face, zooming out to the cabin with her standing over Joel’s beaten body before delivering the final blow. Owen stops the group from killing Ellie and Tommy before Abby says they’re done. The game cuts to black and if the state quarter earlier wasn’t enough, players are sure to understand that this character change is permanent when the words Seattle, Day 1 fade in. She’s woken up by her friend Manny, saying they need to get ready to head out and meet with a man named Issac.

    Now I just want to get one thing out of the way before starting Abby’s story. Her fucking arms. I know to many of you this will sound ridiculous, but I have seen far too many people debating and complaining about Abby being too buff for a woman, even going so far as to call it “distracting”. Look, she’s the best soldier among the wolves. The gym is literally right outside of her room. She works out, with her arms likely being the product of her years training, possibly fueled by her desire to find and kill Joel. 

It’s a nonsensical argument that’s only made by whining manchildren who are sad their favorite character went to that big driving range in the sky. If you want proof, look up half of the fighters in women’s MMA and try to tell me Abby’s arms are too big. It’s these kinds of criticisms that make most of the game’s negative reviews difficult to take at face value since sifting through all this bullshit is impossible.

If you have issues with this game that’s fine, I do too, and while I love the game for its accomplishments I can totally understand others being more bothered by its faults or simply disliking some of its creative choices, but there’s a difference between faults and things you personally dislike and there’s a difference between having an opinion and being wrong. Though to be fair, I’m sure anyone unable to tell the difference already left a comment and a dislike before clicking away so I guess I’m just preaching to the choir, but I thought it was important to address.

Abby and Manny walk the halls of the stadium that acts as a wolf base. They discuss Manny’s habit of sleeping around, Abby talks to the guy Ellie killed at the school who also mentions Leah, and Manny tells her that Mel’s going with them to see Issac to her dismay. From these opening moments, the game sets up what seems to be a cliched lesson about revenge always being wrong. How all of these people Ellie hunted had lives of their own and blah blah blah. We’ll soon see that that isn’t entirely the case, but for now let’s move on.

    They find Mel, Owen’s girlfriend and the pregnant woman Ellie killed at the end of her story. There’s some awkward tension between the girls due to Abby’s past with Owen, but Mel explains that while others have objected to her going on missions, she wanted to be useful and demanded to join. They go to grab a dog for the trip, Abby plays fetch with one in the meantime and they head out.

    On the way, the group is ambushed by scars on horses, which leads to a really fun set piece from the bed of the truck. Eventually they reach a blockade and Manny is forced to crash the truck before they all sneak inside a nearby building. They encounter some infected and we learn two things- that Abby uses shivs like Joel and that her new arsenal is incredibly useful against the undead.

    It’s interesting that the game decides to make Abby play like Joel. It adds a new layer of difficulty to stealth since quick kills now require the use of limited resources and thematically it’s a bit on the nose, but it does show how she and Joel are two sides of the same coin- killing someone else’s loved one and in turn having that loved one come for revenge.

    The arsenal is pretty basic now, with a typical pistol, semi-automatic rifle, and pipe bombs, all of which have some sort of equivalent in Ellie’s loadout, but due to the tweaks of each weapon Abby’s playstyle still feels unique. It’s a great balance between variety and familiarity, enough to shake things up in this half of the game without completely alienating the player.

    After, Mel and Abby are separated from Manny. Abby asks why she’s been so distant since Jackson and she says she feels uneasy about what they did. She agrees Joel deserved what he got, but doesn’t feel right about killing someone like that. Abby initially takes offense at this, thinking it’s a slight against her for being cruel. 

    While solving a puzzle, I found a new training manual, opening up a new upgrade tree. It’s interesting how little changes like the order of unlocking these skills and the new abilities thrown into Abby’s campaign keep the game fresh for longer than players might expect upon starting from scratch.

Mel and Abby talk about Owen and their hobbies, Abby mentions that she’s scared of heights, and they soon reach a vantage point on the roof to find a route to the hospital. Abby tries to smooth things over by complimenting Mel’s contributions to the group as a doctor and Mel seems to accept them.

They run into some scars on the way and one thing I’d like to point out is how natural the battlefields feel in this game compared to its predecessor. In the first game a lot of areas seemed like they were made for shootouts, with blocky obstacles and arena-like layouts. Here, each location feels much more unique and organic due, with more variety in its terrain. 

Cars and trees scattered around, grass and leaves to hide in, and objects to crawl under all feel natural. Sure there are objects placed around that are obviously meant to be used as cover, but they’re much more rare and less blocky, with character animations even compensating by adjusting the height of a character’s squatting animation when behind shorter cover. It’s just a really cool way to make the game even more immersive while also challenging players to see each new environment as a brand new challenge to overcome.

After the scars are taken care of, the gang gets surrounded by another group at a gas station. After a quick shootout, the wolves come riding in to save the day. With that, the three and their dog get a ride over to the hospital and they drop off an injured Mel before heading to Issac. Abby says Mel shouldn’t be out in the field, clearly showing that she cares for her safety even if the two are at odds right now.

At the base, Abby walks around and seems to be really popular with pretty much everyone, including some of Ellie’s later victims. She goes into a medical tent and sees a massive room full of dead bodies. At first I thought this would be where the game did its cliche lesson on how many people Ellie’s killed and how she’s just as bad as Abby, but no. Instead, most of these bodies are from the war against the scars.

I find it really sobering to think about how Abby has no clue Ellie’s coming after her. None of the scars even mention intruders outside of Tommy’s sniping escapades later on. Compared to the raging war, Ellie’s revenge tirade doesn’t even register, which is scary to think about.

How often do we hear about large numbers of people dying in the news without any metric for the effect it has? If I were to say that 3 people died in a house fire today and another 2 died tomorrow that would feel really significant, almost personal. But if I were to say that 40,000 people died in a war this month, how much would a difference of 1 or 2 thousand more make on your reaction to that news? My guess is that it wouldn’t change much, despite every single person in that one to two thousand having just as much of a life as you or me. Maybe I’m looking a bit too much into it, but for me this moment really showcases how relative we as a people see the value of a single human life.

In the tent, Nora points out one of the dead bodies being that of a man named Danny, who was on patrol with Owen before coming back alone with a bullet wound. Apparently he spoke to Issac before dying and that’s what he wants to see Abby about.

Inside we finally get to meet the mysterious Issac. A brutal introduction where he’s torturing a naked man like it’s a casual chore before leading Abby and Manny to his office. He reveals that Danny told him that Owen shot him in order to protect a scar. Abby refuses to believe this and requests permission to go after him, but Issac refuses, explaining his plan to attack the island that houses the scars during an incoming storm in order to wipe them out for good and end the war, while saying he needs Abby to be a leader in the assault. Once he leaves, Abby immediately decides to go after Owen.

Cut to three years earlier. Abby and Owen are having a cute date on an abandoned ferris wheel where Abby once again explains her fear of heights before diving into the water after him when he doesn’t resurface. I love how her fear is emphasized by a reverse dolly zoom effect whenever the player looks over the edge of a ledge, both in the cutscene and in gameplay. It’s just another super interesting idea that adds to the player’s association with Abby.

    She follows Owen to the inside of an aquarium. Their date continues, they discover an abandoned ship, and eventually steal the keys from the dead owner. Through their dialogue we confirm the scars are a pseudo-religious cult-like group. They kiss in a beautiful underwater chamber, but Abby can’t focus due to her obsession with finding Joel, wanting to go back to training. She leaves as Owen stays behind to contemplate what happened.

    From this we can infer two things about Abby’s obsession with revenge- first, it’s likely what drove her and Owen apart since she couldn’t focus on romance. It’s possible this was just with Owen, since he knew her father, but at the very least it’s a clear wedge between the two. Second, that her skills as a soldier are likely fueled by her obsession. Two interesting character traits that go to show how much of a negative impact this mission had on her life.

    Back in the present, Manny sees Abby off and wishes her luck in finding Owen. From there we have a few minor encounters, likely to give players a chance to experiment with Abby’s arsenal and decide on a preferred playstyle, before finding a shotgun in a china shop, which is really fun to destroy.

    Then there’s a scar encounter with a new type of enemy- snipers. They’re pretty rare, but when they’re around having these super dangerous adversaries scanning a massive chunk of the available space makes encounters really tense and engaging. Just like with the first game, it’s these constant changes to encounters that continuously challenge the player to adapt their playstyle to the game.

    I’ve heard some complaints that this game and its predecessor are shallow, but that’s simply not true. They’re deep in a different way. While a game like Metal Gear Solid 5 gets its depth and variety from having a near endless number of possibilities for players to interact with the game and accomplish goals, The Last of Us achieves depth in its limitations. Constantly evolving enemy varieties, environmental layouts, and surprises along with some story events causing changes to your arsenal ensure that no two confrontations are the same, which is why I’d genuinely say that The Last of Us is equally proficient in both storytelling and gameplay.

    This can be seen in the next engagement at a destroyed building. The verticality here is unlike anything seen before in the series, forcing players to change how they approach enemies if they want to avoid getting caught. The gameplay options available haven’t changed, but the ways in which the player can utilize them have.

    I actually ran away from a fight here and the game had the character I was fighting shout out to the others not to let me escape. It’s amazing how much that added to the feeling of being pursued by a group of killers. However, once Abby gets away she’s tackled to the ground and despite managing to bite off a chunk of her assailant’s ear which is just brutal in the best way she’s held down and knocked out.

Flash back 4 months. Abby arrives at the aquarium and Owen hesitantly lets her in. He’s clearly been busy renovating, with the entire building brought back to life with lighting, decorations, and games. It tells us a lot about Owen’s personality that he’d go through all of this effort just to have a sanctuary away from the wolves, possibly even foreshadowing his need to escape. Through context clues we also learn that he and Abby have broken up. There’s a fun little archery minigame, but he’s nervous about putting her name on the scoreboard since Mel might realize she was there, showing their problems stemmed back to before Jackson. Owen then takes her to his other setup- a full- on Christmas suite, setting it all up to celebrate his one year anniversary with Mel.

And come on, how can you not love this guy? Owen’s not just some typical hopeless romantic or perfect boyfriend. He’s flawed, but endearing. He’ll make sarcastic jokes with friends, go through all the effort in the world to make someone smile, he’s the kind of guy you’d want as a friend for sure. He’s also a killer who was there when Joel was killed, has killed numerous scars, and cheats on Mel a little later. A well-written, believable, and likable character, especially when considering his limited screen time. Abby’s in a happy mood because she’s obtained Issac’s permission to follow a lead to Jackson, hearing that Tommy was there. She’s already rounded up the rest of the gang, with Owen being the last on board. He clearly wants to move on from Jerry’s death, but also wants to support Abby, so he agrees to the plan.

Back in modern day Abby wakes up as she’s dragged over to a noose waiting for her. She’s hung in the air, only standing on a bucket to survive, but just as the scar is about to cut her open, there’s a whistle from the distance. The ritual is paused and a young girl is brought out to the clearing. The scar calls her Yara and asks her where the other apostate is before getting spit in the face. She tells the guards to clip her wings and we get a really disturbing scene of the two men smashing one of her elbows with a hammer. It’s genuinely hard to watch. As they go for the second arm, an arrow comes flying out of the shadows, killing the guard and Yara kills the other with an axe. As the leader tries to find the assailant, Abby jumps onto her head and begins strangling her with her thighs. Yara kills off the last one, but Abby accidentally kicks over the bucket and begins to hang. 

The bowman comes out of the shadows and reveals himself to be a young boy with a shaved head who ignores the hanging Abby and talks to Yara, who tells him to cut Abby down, calling him Lev. He’s hesitant because she’s a wolf, but does as his sister says. There’s a quick escape sequence from a forest of runners and stalkers while equipped with only a hammer and the occasional bottle for stunning enemies, making for a really unique experience before the three get away.

Eventually they find a massive scar who attacks Abby with a sledgehammer in a  pseudo-melee boss fight, conveniently against the scar who stole her backpack. After, the group continues their escape with Abby learning that they’re siblings and apostates of the scar cult with Lev refusing to fully trust her, but Yara being more open. They reach a trailer and Abby splints Yara’s arm, telling them not to stay put for too long before heading out. There’s a quick batch of infected in the nearby storage units, and then again after swimming to a boat outside the aquarium, in a really tough stealth challenge. Why she didn’t just go around I have no idea, but she’s here now. 

She finally makes it inside the aquarium, discovering it to be in a state of disrepair. She finds Owen drunk, wallowing in the boat. He tells her that he shot Danny in self-defense after Danny threatened him for not killing an old, defenseless scar. He mentions that after years of killing scars, something about this situation caused him to choose mercy. It’s heartbreaking to hear as Owen copes with being a traitor to the wolves and confronting the fact that he’s a killer, but it’s also fantastic foreshadowing of Abby and Ellie’s later decisions. 

He also says he plans to fix up the boat and take it to Santa Barbara, where he believes surviving fireflies may be gathering. The two argue over his decision, with Abby mad that he’d abandon her and Mel to follow a rumor and telling him to grow up. Owen gets mad, cutting into Abby and asking if torturing the person who killed his parents is how someone grows up, further elaborating on his uneasiness with the events in Jackson. The two grapple each other but before they can fight they pause, look into each others’ eyes, and begin to make out before having sex as the screen cuts to black.

I think this scene adds a lot of drama to the dynamic among Abby’s friends. Owen cheated on Mel with her, he showed how much Joel’s killing affected him, and when they’re about to fight it’s just so obvious that he’s scared. I think that’s why the two stopped fighting and had sex. They both realized they were more angry with their situation than each other and wanted comfort and to comfort one another. It’s a relatable moment, even if it is a bit abrupt.

As far as the sex scene itself goes, it’s fine. Normally I wouldn’t bother bringing this up, but I’ve seen some people claiming this is tasteless or somehow inappropriate for video games. Honestly I couldn’t care less about it and anyone that does needs to grow up. As long as both characters are consenting adults and it doesn’t take away from the story the same standards apply to sex scenes in games as in movies. 

The camera even pans away so there’s nothing too graphic on the screen. Could it have panned away or cut a little earlier like it did with Ellie and Dina? Sure, but does the fact that they didn’t make the scene any worse? Not at all.

Moving on, Abby relives the nightmare of her father’s death, but this time upon entering the operating room she finds a forest behind the door, with Lev and Yara’s dead bodies hanging from nooses above. She wakes up, rubs the bruise on her neck, and decides to go after them, starting day 2.

    Abby reaches the shipping facility, but discovers it surrounded by scars. She makes it inside the trailer, but Yara’s in dire need of help, her arm bright red with infection. Abby takes her back to the aquarium where, surprise surprise, Mel happens to have dropped by. That’s fortunate for Yara as she takes a look at the arm before diagnosing her with compartment syndrome, requiring a few medical supplies to cut her arm off.

    Abby suggests she go to the hospital to grab the supplies and Lev offers to join her since he knows secret scar pathways they can take to avoid wolves. They decide to head out, but Owen tries to discuss the previous night with Abby beforehand. She’s cold to him, upset that Mel is at the aquarium, but he tells her that the previous night was special. It’s hard not to sympathize with Owen’s position of being in love with Abby, but feeling obligated to stay with Mel due to her pregnancy. Of course it doesn’t put him in the right for cheating, but both his indecisiveness and Abby’s frustration are equally understandable.

    Lev leads the way as the two get to know one another as they head to the hospital. We learn that the scars prefer to go by the name seraphites and that the cult is a group that followed a mysterious prophet to move away from technology, deeming them the cause of the infection. That said, they also make exceptions for soldiers and higher ups to use technology as they see fit. It’s a clever, if not entirely subtle, jab at hypocrisies seen in many religious organizations.

They take out some infected, but soon come upon a group of seraphites. During the fight, they call out to Lev, but address him as Lily. Abby mentions it afterward, but Lev says he doesn’t want to talk about it so she drops the subject.

    Looks like we’re back to another unfair criticism of the game- deadnaming. I understand that there are a lot of people who are sensitive to this issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to have characters do this in a story. This is a religious cult that doesn’t accept transsexuality as valid and it makes perfect sense that they’d refer to a trans person by their birth name. It in no way validates people who do this in real life and this is an M-rated game made for adults set in a brutal and unforgiving world. 

Controversial topics are not sacred ground. Any story can have ties to any subject it wants. What matters is how that subject is utilized. We’ll discuss Lev as a character a bit later, but for now I’ll just say if deadnaming is something that makes you too uncomfortable to play that’s fine, but that in no way lessens the quality of the game itself, like how being lactose intolerant wouldn’t be a good reason to criticize foods with dairy in them.

As they get to the top floor of an office building, they reach their destination- a rickety bridge connecting two skyscrapers together. Lev tries to coach Abby into using her fear as a means to feel strong, with him seeing the bridge as a non-issue due to his impressive agility. His casual nature even leads to the funniest moments in the game.

After crossing the first bridge they reach a second, even more dangerous, one. The fog disappears as they cross, allowing Abby to see just how high they really are, eventually leading her to slip and Lev to fall in after her. Conveniently they fall through a glass roof into a pool of water and decide to sneak through the hotel. They come upon some spores and Abby finds Lev a gas mask in a tense sneaking segment before helping him put it on in a scene that almost feels motherly.

    On the way out Abby finds a flamethrower and while its use is just as limited as it was in the first game, it’s still good against the shamblers, bloaters, and rat king later on. Plus getting it much earlier in the story gives the player more opportunities to actually use it this time around.

    Once they escape the hotel Lev reveals that he and Yara’s mother is sick and he’s worried about her safety now that they’ve left, saying they couldn’t bring her because of their sudden need to escape. I really like Lev as a character. He’s fun and silly in the ways one would expect a child to be, but also incredibly empathetic and willing to sacrifice a lot for the people he cares about.

    Abby leaves him behind as she approaches the hospital, entering on the premise that Issac sent her to collect the supplies. Unfortunately she’s soon found out and handcuffed to an elevator (without any guards for some reason). Nora comes to her rescue and explains that the hospital’s mostly been cleared out, but the lower floors of ground zero may still have some supplies. She leads Abby to the basement and the two say their goodbyes as she drops in.

    The basement is pretty empty, save for a few clickers roaming around. Honestly, it’s a little surprising that ground zero isn’t a bit more over the top. Maybe the designers didn’t want the area to come off as cheesy or unrealistic, but I think it would have been the perfect excuse to create a really unique nest of the infected. Still, its main job is to act as a small area where Abby can roam around finding empty supply boxes and turning on power with only a few enemies here and there, but it turns out that it’s all an elaborate ruse to get the player’s guard down.

    After finding the supplies she needs, Abby hears rumbling from behind her only to turn around and see the rat king. An absolute monstrosity of an infected, an amalgamous blob of different body parts fused together with its cores being a bloater and a stalker, this terrifying beast isn’t fucking around. There’s a desperate chase sequence as she tries to escape from the beast and it’s one of the best examples of how the fluid animations really help to make the game more immersive.

    In the first game, Joel would occasionally stop in front of obstacles before awkwardly vaulting over them, making chase sequences feel more like interactive cutscenes than real gameplay. Here, the vaulting, stopping animations when changing direction, dynamic destruction of the environments in all of these chase sequences are immaculate, making each one feel like its straight out of an action movie.

    Eventually Abby’s cornered, but manages to use an axe to injure the monster before they both fall into a flooded floor below, beginning a boss fight. The creature can’t really do much aside from walk around destroying the environment, but in this dark, spore-filled basement with a bunch of dead ends that’s more than enough to make this entire fight terrifying. Especially considering that you really don’t want to get into its melee range…

The key to victory is staying mobile with the rat king able to charge like a bloater and disperse spore clouds like a shambler as well as make new pathways for itself by just forcing itself through. When it takes enough damage, the stalker half rips itself off and the big guy stays behind. Apparently the stalker is still around and able to attack in this phase, but I never saw it come out so I only focused on the bloater. 

Once it’s defeated, the stalker runs into another room and Abby gives chase. Once inside a vent the stalker pops out from hiding and the two fall into a waiting room to finish the fight. This stalker is a bit tougher than the others, still able to hide from listen mode, and even able to throw spore bombs, but honestly it’s a pretty easy fight since it can be taken out with some shivs and a couple bullets.

Overall this fight is fine, maybe a bit basic, but at least a solid way to add variety to the combat and add another memorable moment to the game, plus it does a great job of making the player feel like a character in a horror movie taking out the big bad. I think it might have been a bit better if the stalker segment came between the first and second phases instead of at the end, making for a more desperate struggle to finish off the big beast and forcing the player to adjust their tactics twice, but for what it is I think the rat king fight is a lot of fun.

Abby makes her way out of the hospital, where Lev finds her, having been forced out of his hiding spot by the wolves looking for Abby. The two make their way back to the aquarium and as they wait outside the operating room, Lev bonds with Alice the dog. Owen lets him in to see Yara and he and Abby get to talk. They just kind of discuss how their lives have been affected by the fireflies and wolves and how they don’t want the same to happen to Lev and Yara before Abby goes in, happy to see Yara doing well.

That night, she has another dream going through the halls of Saint Mary’s Hospital, but this time when she reaches the operating room her father is alive, turning around and giving her a smile. Now I’m sure I’m not going to blow any minds with this information, but Abby’s dreams are clearly subconscious manifestations of her guilt. 

The one in the cabin is either guilt over supporting her father’s decision to kill Ellie leading to his death or her inability to avenge him, the dream recalling Joel’s death making her feel like a monster, the one with Lev and Yara being a response to her abandoning them, and now she’s at peace. She’s forgiven herself for her failings and flaws and can finally confront her father’s death through acceptance of herself.

Unfortunately she wakes up the next morning to see Lev and Yara arguing. Mel explains that Lev wants to stay in Seattle to help their mother escape the Seraphites, but Yara wants to go with Owen to Santa Barbara. She then takes a massive turn out of left field and scolds Abby, calling her a piece of shit and saying she won’t go to Santa Barbara unless Abby stays behind.

In the scene she says that it’s Abby’s sudden change of heart that makes her so suspicious, but it honestly feels like an excuse. Between the Owen drama, Jackson, and her brutal reputation, it seems like Mel was just waiting for a time to tell Abby how she really felt. There’s also the possibility that Owen told her about his cheating, but that’s just speculation on my part. All in all, it’s hard not to feel bad for Abby here.

She talks to Yara and the two go to search for Lev since he’s run away. They encounter Alice and there’s a far too long scene where you play a game of fetch. Like, it’s cute, but honestly it’s one of the worst examples of this game padding things out. It’s never really a massive issue or affects the pacing in any significant way, but the game does have its moments of tedium. It’s better than carrying ladders around, but a bit of the extra fat could have done with some trimming.

The two reach a balcony and Yara explains that the seraphites called Lev Lily because he’s trans. She explains that it was his transition that caused tension between them and the cultists and how she went from scolding him into rejecting that side of himself, to hiding him away from the others, and finally getting the two of them out after he shaved off his hair. All the while blaming herself for his misery. She also tells her that if they went back for their mother her blind devotion to the seraphites would likely make her hostile to them, possibly even leading her to kill Lev, hence their earlier argument.

Some have said that Yara being the one to inform Abby of Lev’s transsexuality instead of Lev is a bad thing. We’ll cover Lev’s transsexuality when his arc comes to a conclusion later on, but for now let’s focus on Yara. While I can’t condone her actions I think the decision to have her tell Abby makes sense. For one, Abby pretty much tells her that she knows beforehand, but even more importantly Yara’s just a kid. She’s been forced to take care of her brother without help and without being fully able to understand what he’s going through for so long.

So she turns to a person she trusts to ask for advice. It’s a cry for help from a desperate sister wanting to help her brother in any way she can, but not knowing how. After having to keep this secret for so long, I think anyone can relate to her desire to have someone to talk to about her situation. It’s not necessarily the right thing to do, but it’s an understandable one and one I’m sure a lot of people might have made if they were in her situation.

Abby suggests that the two go into the gift shop and find Lev a toy. They find him a shark and Yara tries to cheer Abby up by saying she’s a good person and despite her objections Yara insists. I think this is sweet because it shows that while Abby judges herself by her past actions, this moment likely goes a long way to convincing her that she’s becoming a better person.

Owen comes in and Yara goes to give Lev the toy. Owen tries to convince Abby to come with him to Santa Barbara, saying that they deserve to be happy, something he’s probably realizing himself after wanting to be with her instead of Mel for so long. They don’t have time to discuss at length however as they hear Yara yelling outside. 

When they rush out they see Lev driving away on a boat to get their mother from the scars’ island. Abby and Yara decide to go after him and she scolds Owen for wanting to join them, telling him to get his priorities straight and work on the boat instead, showing her growing maturity over the course of the story through her willingness to give up someone she loves for the sake of someone else. It’s slow going at first with Yara’s amputated arm slowing them down, but it eventually prevents her from continuing so Abby leaves on her own to find them a boat.

    On the way, she’s almost shot by a sniper, but Manny comes out and tackles her to safety behind a car. He tells her that the wolves are planning to attack the scars’ island that night and he was preparing when the sniper showed up. Abby tells him that she needs a boat and the two agree to work together and get the sniper, starting a really intense set piece.

    This isn’t like Joel’s sniper mission in the first game. Here, there’s no path around, only sprints between cover and the occasional ability to crawl under cars to move forward. It’s a really memorable section and definitely keeps tension up, but it’s when they reach the parking garage that things get serious.

    As they try to move forward they not only have to deal with Tommy’s sniping, but also the herds of infected that he sends their way. It’s really cool having the tables turned by facing off against a powerful enemy that used the infected to his advantage. Eventually they begin to chase him, occasionally hiding from fire, but when they try to follow him into a barricaded room Manny’s shot and instantly killed before Abby bursts her way into cover.

    From there, in a scene reminiscent of Ellie’s fight with David, Abby makes her way through an abandoned restaurant until encountering Tommy as she escapes. The two fight for a bit before Yara comes to the rescue, giving Abby the opportunity to knock him off the pier. Yara asks who the man was and she clearly remembers him from before, now in a hurry to finish the mission so they can all escape.

    Two two get to a boat and head to the island, but as they make their way through the wolves begin their attack, making previously safe paths dangerous and putting many of the seraphites on high alert.

They make their way forward, killing off a few groups of seraphites along the way. There’s nothing really game changing here, but the addition of the crossbow as a new weapon to complete Abby’s arsenal and hiding in corn fields being a fun way to take out scars are two neat inclusions.

It’s also a great section to show off the game’s AI. While enemies are definitely a bit too susceptible to hit and run tactics when in a large area like this, in most other ways it’s really impressive. The flanking is better than ever, but even better is their ability to act as a unit. The possibility of being surrounded when sneaking around is very real and one that should be considered when large enemy forces are nearby.

Soon, they reach Yara’s house and find her mother dead on the floor with Lev crying in the corner, covered in wounds. He explains that their mother attacked him and in the process slipped and died from Lev pushing her off of him and hitting her head on the table. Yara comforts him, wanting to make clear that he did nothing wrong. They hear gunshots outside and move towards a place called Haven to steal a boat and get back to the aquarium.

    They press forward as the storm rolls in, avoiding seraphites and wolves alike along the way, but soon get ambushed by one of the wolves who shoots Yara. Abby rushes in and knocks him out, pulling Lev away to protect him from the incoming troops. They recognize Abby as Issac comes out of the woods to hold her up. He demands she let them kill Lev despite her pleas to reason.

    Issac is a bit cliche, but he does a good job representing the merciless and unbiased violence caused by war. He doesn’t care about age, innocence, changes of heart, nothing. The only things that matter to him are blind loyalty and winning the war. He starts counting to 3, even looking like he might let her go at the end before changing his mind before Yara shoots him from the floor, causing the other wolves to kill her as Lev and Abby run away.

    Abby’s in a rush to head out, but Lev’s dealing with the traumatic events that just took place, even blaming Abby since wolves killed Yara. Abby tries to explain that she’s not a wolf anymore and that the two need to get off the island. Honestly, it’s one of the worst pep talks I’ve ever heard and think it would have been better if she had said that Yara would have wanted Lev to survive, but Lev agrees to continue regardless.

    They then encounter a large group of wolves, forcing Abby to kill her former comrades for the first time. This also had a really cool moment where I stole a wolf’s melee weapon after killing him with the one that broke. Once it’s over the two are able to see Haven in the distance as it burns to the ground. 

They make their way through a battlefield and steal a horse starting an incredible sequence. They ride through the island towards Haven, seeing the destruction from the battles raging around them and killing some scars on horseback. Eventually they reach the village and it’s horrifying. People slaughtered left and right, buildings on fire, the screams of the dying setting the score, all of it contributing to an unforgettable section of the game.

A house collapses nearby, causing their horse to rear them off and run away. They’re forced to continue on foot, killing more scars and wolves before going through a burning building as Abby’s separated from her backpack and is forced to fend off a massive man wielding a sledgehammer. 

This mini-boss fight is interesting in that it showcases the best and worst aspects of melee combat in the game. The fight is tense, gory, and extremely cinematic. The flow of combat is easy to follow and it’s a solid fight all around. At one point Abby cuts his mouth open and his screams become more gargled and inhuman as a result, with the final cutscene being particularly brutal.

On the other hand, it sort of feels like off brand Dark Souls. The timing for dodging the man’s attacks are ridiculously generous, pretty much lasting the entirety of his swings. The fight also goes on for a bit too long, with very little variety along the way. It’s enjoyable for the most part, but I think it shows how much more potential the combat could have had with just a bit more fine tuning. With the assailant dead, Abby and Lev reach a boat as bodies fall from the docks above. As Abby rows away, she gives the shivering Lev her jacket and the two make their way back to the aquarium.

    After touching shore we all know what’s coming. They enter the aquarium only to find Alice’s dead body before making their way into the main hall where they discover the bodies of Owen and Mel. Abby breaks down, but as she cries Lev discovers the map that Ellie left behind. I’ve heard some say that this is a plot hole or a writing convenience to get Abby to the theater in that it doesn’t make sense for a skilled survivor like Ellie to leave behind something so important and that’s not a fair argument.

    At that moment in the story, Ellie was dealing with massive shock and having a breakdown of her own. She wasn’t thinking straight and being rushed out of the aquarium by Tommy and Jessie, so it makes perfect sense for her character. I genuinely don’t understand how people could say this is a legitimate criticism. And hell, I’m sure a lot of viewers think I’ve been too soft on this game so far, so let me just point something out.

    This is a story in which Abby’s able to track down Joel in a world where modern communication methods no longer exist, she just so happens to be saved from infected by Joel and Tommy, Ellie conveniently reaches the cabin just as Abby’s delivering the final blows, Jessie happened to be the one to catch Ellie, Abby was saved from being hung by Yara’s sudden arrival, Abby happened to run into the scar who took her backpack a mere few hours after being caught, Abby and Lev magically fall into a pool off the sky bridge, and Yara was alive after being shot and able to kill Issac just in time to save Abby.

You have all of these options to pick from and you think Ellie leaving a map behind after having a panic attack is a plot convenience? Seriously?! I also want to make it clear that plot conveniences and deus ex machina aren’t necessarily negatives in a story if they make sense. Even then if the circumstances caused by these writing tricks lead to an even better story as a result then it’s fine to include them. It just boggles my mind that this is one of the most prominent criticisms of the writing in this game when it makes perfect sense.

Abby and Lev make their way to the theater, sneaking in through the side. She holds up Tommy in the lobby and we see the events at the end of Ellie’s story from Abby’s perspective. It’s honestly a little strange hearing Ellie pronounce that she’s the reason humanity is doomed before remembering that she has no idea why Abby really killed Joel. It really emphasizes how little the two understand about each others’ situation.

As Abby points her gun at Ellie, Tommy rushes to her rescue, only to be shot in the leg by Lev and then in the face by Abby, seemingly killing him. One thing that’s interesting to note is that before Tommy attacked, Abby’s finger wasn’t on the trigger, meaning she might have been more willing to discuss, but now we have to have a boss fight. And it’s easily the worst part of the game.

Abby chases Ellie backstage where after a quick scuffle Ellie gets a gun and Abby’s forced to hide, replicating the fight with David from the first game in the worst ways. I’ll tell you what, if you still hate Abby at this point, this fight was made for you. 

The prompts for taking out an enemy around corners don’t appear in this fight, meaning the player is forced to sneak behind Ellie to strike or throw a bottle to stun her. The problem is that her peripheral vision is superhuman and she has the worst habit of turning around constantly, making the fight a chore more than anything.

Plus for some reason, this professionally trained soldier is completely unable to fight this scrawny woman so even trying melee combat results in instant death, which makes very little sense. At the very least when they fall through the floor and Ellie starts using her shotgun it’s more believable that she could take Abby in a fight.

There are some interesting ideas at play here like the chains making noise that gives away your location, but I see no reason for this fight to exist, especially since this all could have been resolved in the same way with a few quick time events during a cutscene, especially since I think the ending works brilliantly.

In the end Abby gets the better of Ellie, but as she’s about to beat her senseless Dina comes to the rescue, only for Lev to shoot her with an arrow. Ellie begs Abby to spare Dina, telling her she’s pregnant and it doesn’t work, but just before Abby slits Dina’s throat, Lev convinces her to stop. She does, threatening Ellie one last time before she and Lev walk away.

This scene wraps up both Lev and Abby’s character arcs wonderfully. I’ve seen a lot of articles written about Lev as a character and I want to discuss what I’ve heard. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a straight cis man and I understand that my perspective is limited, but the purpose of this video is to critique the game and Lev’s inclusion is a significant part of the experience. Some have said that Lev’s purpose in this game is to simply be a pawn used to convey the trans experience through a straight gaze, particularly by traumatizing him from start to finish and I consider that extremely reductionist.

Of course, I could go on a tirade about how nitpicking representation is a fantastic way to ensure that fewer developers go out of their way to make their games more diverse in the future, but that’s a topic for another day. As far as this game goes, Lev is a stellar character that has a complete arc and while his story is centered around his experience as a trans boy in a  religious cult, that’s not his entire personality (as I described earlier).

Lev’s inclusion in this game isn’t just for brownie points. If the central theme is the destructive power of hatred and revenge, then Lev’s story reflects the damage caused by bigotry. He’s always seen the cycles of hatred from the inside looking out whether it be the seraphites and the wolves or that which he received from the cult and his mother. With Abby he gets his first opportunity to see this cycle from the outside looking in and he tries to break it.

Lev’s defining character trait is his unwillingness to give up on others. He trusted his sister more than the seraphites, but still stayed true to their teachings. He went back to the island for his mom wanting to believe that she could still change and even after being attacked he felt guilty for her death. Here, despite all of the horrible things he’s gone through, and possibly because he knows the power of hatred and violence better than anyone else in the game, Lev convinces Abby to stop. If the fireflies’ motto is, “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light,” then in Abby’s story Lev is the light and if I were trans, I’d be proud to have such an amazing character representing me. Plus while he is traumatized throughout the story, he’s also one of the only characters to come out of it better off than when it started.

Abby’s story also reaches its end here, with her rejection of the cycle of violence showing her growth as a person. However, this ties in heavily with Ellie’s story, so we’ll return to this at the end.

    The game cuts to some time later where we see Ellie inside a house on a farm. She and Dina are raising her child JJ. They seem to have a happy life, the one they frequently discussed while in Seattle. We see them perform their daily chores, get a chance to explore the farm and take in the beautiful scenery, and it appears the game is wrapping up.

    Sadly, as Ellie herds the animals back into the barn, she experiences multiple PTSD flashbacks. Once when she knocks some tools over and again when the wind slams the barn door shut. She runs down some stairs in a hallway with Joel’s screams on the other side of the door, but she’s unable to open it as Dina rushes in to snap her out of it.

    Later on, Ellie returns from hunting to find Tommy inside. He apparently survived his injuries, but now has a limp and a damaged eye. He explains that he and Maria are having difficulties, likely due to him continuing to search for Abby as we soon learn that he’s managed to track down her general location in Santa Barbara using his contacts. She tells him that she won’t go after her, leading him to scold her and play to her guilt before leaving.

    Ellie wakes up in the middle of the night and from her journal entries we can see that her PTSD has gotten worse over time and she can’t let Jackson go. She begins to play the guitar before transitioning to a flashback. We see the scene described throughout the story that took place the night before Joel’s death. Ellie and Jessie discuss patrols and Dina before Dina comes over to take Ellie to dance. The two flirt for a bit before sharing a kiss, causing Seth to accost them, eventually calling them Dykes.

    It’s genuinely hard to watch and easily shows why Ellie wasn’t willing to forgive him the next day. Before she can fight back Joel comes in and shoves him prompting Maria to come between the two before she and Tommy take him out of the barn. Ellie then admonishes Joel for thinking he has the right to be involved in her life before he leaves.

    The scene flashes back to the present where Ellie’s packing up as Dina comes downstairs. There’s a heart wrenching scene in which she begs Ellie to stay, even saying she won’t wait for Ellie anymore, but Ellie’s already made up her mind and leaves. I’ve seen some people say that this isn’t consistent with Ellie’s character or that it doesn’t make sense and I think I know why.

    This is a choice that most people disagree with. Seeing Ellie happy on the farm with Dina and JJ, it’s difficult to understand why she’d give all of that up to hunt down Abby, but just because you disagree with the choices a character makes doesn’t mean it’s the wrong choice for that character. Ellie can’t eat or sleep properly, she’s obsessed and constantly burdened by overwhelming guilt for not being able to save Joel, even to the point of having episodes while holding JJ. Leaving to stop Abby is both a decision for herself, but also so she can live a happy life in peace. It doesn’t mean she made the right choice, but her decision is perfectly understandable.

    From there the game cuts to Abby and Lev making their way through a Santa Barbara neighborhood. They seem to have bonded and formed a sibling-like relationship as seen from their banter as they clear various houses of clickers.

    They soon find a hidden basement with a radio inside. They call the numbers on it and manage to contact someone who says the fireflies are regrouping and tells them where to go after hearing who Abby’s father was. When they try to leave however, they’re attacked and captured by the sick lovechild of Guy Fieri and Dog the Bounty Hunter.

    I think these scenes are fine, but ultimately unnecessary to the story, potentially even distracting from it. Right now we know Abby’s inside the slave camp, but I think it would have been better to leave that as a surprise. We don’t need this information and the gameplay isn’t anything special when compared to the rest of the game, so it feels superfluous.

    From here we cut to Ellie arriving on the beach and finding Abby’s boat. She discerns Abby’s destination from the journal inside and moves forward. There are a few encounters with infected, combining every variety seen thus far in some cramped spaces around the Santa Barbara houses, so it’s entertaining enough. Eventually she’s caught up in a rope trap and gets severely injured when it swings her into a branch before passing out.

    She wakes up to see two men approaching her, one of whom is the Smash Mouth member that took Abby before. They cut her down and after the other man gets scared by a nearby clicker, she mocks him, prompting him to grab her and bring her near it for fun, but she manages to turn the tables and drag him into its mouth before using his rifle to shoot the legs of the leader. She approaches him and demands to know Abby’s location. He tells her and Ellie kills him before moving on.

    This gives Ellie the silenced submachine gun as a weapon and it’s really useful. In exchange, the enemies now commonly wear helmets and body armor making them harder to take out, providing balance while also adding new elements to keep combat engaging. Over at the villa there’s another cool idea with the chained up infected scattered around making for a fun way to distract enemies as you either take them down or sneak right by.

    After getting through most of the complex, Ellie actually saves some of the slaves after sending a guard towards their cell in a fight. She learns from them that Abby and Lev tried to escape and were sent to the pillars to die. Ellie continues as the others lead an escape plan. Her injuries are starting to catch up with her as she makes her way to the beach, barely able to clear obstacles along the way with the sounds of battle all around her.

    I find it very telling that Ellie manages to get all the way here, even saving people from lives of enslavement, but is so single-minded that none of it matters. It shows that she could do great things and help a lot of people, but chooses not to, all for the sake of this pointless quest for revenge.

    When she reaches the pillars she finds Abby and Lev crucified and on the brink of death. Her hair is cut, she’s beaten and bruised, and she’s clearly malnourished. Ellie pulls out her knife, but instead of killing her, she cuts Abby down who in turn gets Lev off his post as well. She leads Ellie to the shore where two motor boats wait for them. Abby puts Lev into one, but as Ellie puts her backpack away she’s still plagued with Joel’s memory. She turns around and demands Abby fight her, throwing her into the ocean when she declines. When she refuses again, Ellie threatens Lev’s life, forcing Abby to agree and the final confrontation begins.

    This fight is insane. The gameplay is still simple, but it’s absolutely brutal. It’s somewhere between gameplay and a quick time event, but all in all it’s just a vicious fight to the death from two people who hardly even know why they’re fighting anymore. It reminds me of the fight at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 in all the best ways.

    In the end, despite Abby biting off two of her fingers Ellie gets the upper hand and begins to drown her, but she has a vision of Joel looking at her from the last time she saw him, causing her to let go and allow Abby to leave, wallowing in the water until the screen cuts to black.

    Ellie then arrives at the farm house with her severed fingers in frame. She walks up to the house and we get the gut punch of seeing her walk in to the completely empty building. Every single room has been wiped clean with one exception- her room. She sits down and looks around before trying to play the guitar, but can’t due to her lost fingers. The game cuts to its final flashback, the last conversation between Joel and Ellie. I could summarize it for you, but I think it’s better seen than described.

The game flashes forward to Ellie as she ponders for a moment before placing the guitar by a windowsill reminiscent of the title screen from the first game and the camera pans to show her walking away as the credits roll.

There are two camps I’ve seen in regards to criticizing this ending. First, there are the people who hate Abby to the point of still wanting to see Ellie drown her in the ocean, which is poor criticism because it assumes that not getting the ending you wanted means the story is bad, but the second camp has some legitimate points- those who say the decision to spare Abby doesn’t make sense for Ellie given what we know about her as a character and that it was only shoe-horned in to conclude the story with the cliched moral that revenge is bad. 

I think this argument makes a lot of sense on the surface and anyone saying it’s the reason they dislike the ending is perfectly valid in their interpretation of the events taking place. However, I see things differently and would like to explain.

In order to understand why Ellie forgives Abby at the end of the story, we have to understand why she’s hunting her down to begin with. Now the obvious reason is that she wants to avenge Joel’s death and that’s true, but why is she so determined to do so? Why is Ellie so driven in her desire for revenge that she’s willing to endanger her friends and give up her happy family life to get revenge for the man who lied to her for years? The man she wanted out of her life. Why does it trigger such severe PTSD? It’s because of guilt.

Ellie never forgave Joel for what he did and just when she was starting to, Abby took away her opportunity to do so. She stole her chance to make amends with Joel and as a result, she focuses all of that self hatred on Abby, not just because of the lost time with Joel, but also because of her guilt over not forgiving him sooner and in the end, it’s about making that choice. 

You can’t force someone into forgiveness, so when the option is taken away, so is the ability to forgive. When Ellie was going to leave the theater on day 3, she had to leave for Dina’s sake. At the end of the theater fight, Abby won and she had no agency in the matter. Not only that, but the entire time she’s been questioning herself, simultaneously feeling guilty over her inability to forgive Joel while also unsure if killing all of these people to get revenge is the right thing to do.

Ellie’s flashback to the party in the barn was her remembering her inability to forgive Joel. In the final cutscene with the two we see that she at least tried to reconcile with him, showing that before she could only focus on her guilt while by the end, she was able to accept what happened and move on, symbolized by her laying down the guitar.

So when she saw Abby at the pillars, she initially cut her down believing she could finally let go of her need for revenge, but forces her to fight after having that last flashback of Joel. That final nagging voice saying she wasn’t truly okay with letting Abby go. It wasn’t until the very end that she could finally say she was completely in power and accepted her decision to relinquish her anger at Abby as well as own her personal guilt. That’s also why she could kill so many people to get there and still make this decision now- because it had to be Abby.

Abby was in a similar situation with Joel and Ellie. She encouraged her father to perform the surgery, meaning she likely felt some undue guilt over his death. She told Owen to stay behind with Mel as well, likely adding to that feeling. The difference is that she spared Ellie and Dina at the theater not because she needed the power to do so, but because Lev acts as a reminder of her transformation into a better person despite he himself  likely feeling more guilt than Abby at that point since his decision to run away is what got Yara killed and ensured he and Abby wouldn’t be around to protect Owen and Mel.

This also ties into the other argument that the story’s message is cliched and ham-fisted, but I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, I’d say the story’s moral is so subtle that it actually went over a lot of people’s heads. Why? Because the moral of the story isn’t that revenge is bad, it’s that violence and revenge create a cycle. One that can be started in an instant and broken at any time, but once started, you have to be willing to face the consequences.

If the central question of the first game is how far one would go to protect the people they love, then the question posed by The Last of Us Part 2 is how far are you willing to go to satiate your own hatred? When is forgiveness no longer an option and can that ever change? This is the lingering question throughout the entire story. Ellie’s flashbacks with Joel, Lev and his mother, the wolf and scar war, and of course, Ellie and Abby. We’re not always aware of or as willing to deal with the consequences of our actions so the message of this game isn’t that violence or hatred are bad, just that it’s best to truly consider the repercussions of our actions beforehand and realize they may affect more than just ourselves.

And much like with the question posed by the first game this also has no concrete answer. Different people will respond differently and part of what makes this game so great is that it may cause some to question their answer and consider the perspectives of others.

And while there are plenty of moments showcasing the negatives of violence there are just as many showing its potential for good as well. The slavers at the end of the story are proof enough of that. Plus, if Owen hadn’t stopped the group from killing Ellie and Tommy they wouldn’t have been killed by them later on and Lev’s compassion causing him to go back for his mother indirectly led to the deaths of others he cared about. 

Plus even though Ellie spared Abby, in the end she still returned to an empty home. Dina’s purpose this whole time has been to show how hatred can affect your relationships with the ones you love, and that it will inevitably lead to a point of no return. Once Ellie left the farm house, she had lost Dina for good and her decision of whether to kill Abby had zero effect on that outcome.

Hell, if she hadn’t gone to Santa Barbara, Abby would have died anyway. So while violence in this game is definitely portrayed in a lot of ways as wrong, it’s also the sole reason Abby’s alive in a weird way. In fact, I think the game would have been far more patronizing if Ellie had killed Abby before returning to the empty farmhouse because then it would solidify that revenge is always bad and forgiveness is always good. Of course, there are a lot of ways to interpret this ending, but that’s my take on it.

After the credits roll, the title screen changes to show the beach where Abby and Lev landed near the firefly base. It’s an ambiguous, but hopeful ending for the two. And while the multiplayer is gone, the player can still unlock concept art and some really cool cheats and extra visual modes to check out while going through new game plus, but that’s all similar to the first game and I think this video’s long enough, so let’s wrap things up.

    The Last of Us is a masterpiece and a gaming classic. It’s a game that did not need a follow up and one for which the very idea of creating a sequel must have been extremely daunting. I believe the Last of Us Part 2 lives up to its predecessor in every way and surpasses it in more than one. 

    With massively improved and expanded gameplay, new techniques and mechanics around every turn, another beautiful soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla, entrancing performances from all of the actors, especially Laura Bailey and Ashley Johnson, some of, if not the, best graphics of any game released to this date, incredible art and sound direction combined with top-tier animation bringing those graphics to life and yes, a gripping, intriguing, and consistently engaging narrative that keeps the player invested throughout, I consider the Last of Us Part 2 to be yet another masterpiece.

    It’s a game that’s more subtle than its predecessor, but also much more mature and original. It takes risks that few developers would ever dream of taking and pulls nearly every one of them off. It has its flaws like the theater fight, awkward pacing caused by the dual campaigns, visual glitches here and there, and some chapters that are either too long or superfluous, but I don’t believe any of these prevent it from being incredible. 

While the community is split on the game right now, I suspect that people will warm up to it over time and even if I’m wrong I’m positive that people will be discussing it for years to come. So why is it that others disagree? What caused the massive disconnect between players and critics? Well as stated before there’s a not insignificant number of players that either hate the LGBT representation or read the script leaks and never actually played the game. There are also many who use the unfair complaints that I’ve debunked over the course of this video. That is why I believe the disconnect to be so massive, as critics tend to be professional and not fall into those traps.

However, I want to reiterate that there are genuine reasons some may dislike the game, like the ones I just listed. If they bother you more than they do me, that’s fine, but I hope I’ve explained why some criticisms are less valid than others and why the game still deserves to be held in high regard. Because if I were to score these games, they’d both get a ten out of ten. Not for being perfect, but for being two of the best examples of the kinds of experiences video games are capable of. I can’t recommend them enough and can’t wait to see what Naughty Dog has in store for us in the future.

With that said, so ends my Last of Us retrospective. If your opinion differs from mine, I’d really appreciate you sharing it in the comments down below. This is a complex game and I love to hear what others have to say about it, just please keep things civil and respectful. My next video is going to be ranking all of the games I played in 2020, so subscribe to see that when it goes live. For now, thank you so much for watching and have a mighty nifty day today!