Mike Crowley
The Last of Us is a big, sprawling, linear work of art that redefined how you could interpret drama in a video game. Other creators tried to make their games more than just a game, but they couldn’t quite reach writer Neil Druckmann’s heights. Hideo Kojima came close with his meta Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. The game made you question reality and the very fabric of our existence. It was a title that wasn’t appreciated at the time, but garnered much praise over the years. Time so far hasn’t been as kind to Druckmann’s follow-up, The Last of Us Part II. It’s a game that, despite its mixed reception, I praised at the time. But looking back at it, I’m not as confident in it as I was before.
What follows are spoilers for The Last of Us Part II. Please be advised.
I’m not one of those guys who’s in the Joel should live camp. Joel (Troy Baker) doomed humanity at the end of The Last of Us and got exactly what he deserved. The problem with Joel’s execution is that all of the game’s spoilers were leaked shortly before the game came out, robbing it of some of its context. For starters, the leaks said a transvestite killed Joel with a golf club. It turns out Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is a woman. Even if she wasn’t, who cares? That’s a topic for a whole other conversation. The fact that angry keyboard warriors were saying this added a very nasty, judgmental factor to a game the player hadn’t experienced yet. When I read the leaked plot, it seemed like a bit of cheap shock value to further along a shallow plot; it turns out I wasn’t entirely wrong.
The Tediousness of Shock Value
The Last of Us Part II relies on shock value to make the player understand the horror of violence. Joel’s death is effective. Seeing him lay helpless on the floor reminds us of what violence really looks like. Its ugliness gets even worse as the game progresses. Ellie’s (Ashley Johnson) path of revenge is not glamorous. The game made me not want to kill anyone. Yet I was forced to do so, from humans to dogs. All while Ellie is taunting her opponents by saying, “took out your friend.” and “f*****r.” Ellie’s not only killing but relishing it. I still give The Last of Us Part II high praise for daring to make a video game that intentionally makes you disgusted with your actions instead of enjoying the bloodshed like so many other video games do. Yet, when the shock wears off, the game doesn’t have much underneath.
The driving factor of The Last of Us Part II is how the cycle of violence is a neverending spiral of madness. Midway through Ellie’s story, I began to grow tired of seeing her quest for vengeance. Without a clear goal other than to kill someone else, what is there to emotionally grip onto? The revenge plot is overdone. John Wick, Monkey Man, Boy Kills World, Kill Bill, and Cape Fear all exhaust the revenge plot. The only difference in this game, unlike those films, is that it’s anti-violence.
Some movies are antiviolent. Come and See and Irreversible spring to mind. And they do the antiviolence message much better than The Last of Us Part II. After the shock wears off within a couple of hours, it becomes a tedious exercise to get from point A to point B, with some intermediate open-world elements sprinkled twice in the game. With the weakened narrative, it becomes more noticeable that the LOU series is a depressing Uncharted, with the mechanics limited, so the player feels like they’re in an interactive drama instead of an action flick.
In the second most controversial aspect of the plot, the player switches gears to playing as Joel’s killer, Abby. We learn through Abby’s backstory that she wasn’t always a bench-pressing, vengeful woman. She was once a sweet girl to a father who was a surgeon. Here’s where the story feels a bit too coincidental. Abby’s father was the guy who was going to conduct the fatal brain surgery on Ellie that would lead to the cure for humanity. How did it happen to be that specific guy’s kid who winds up killing Joel? It would have been much more effective if it was one of the many random soldiers you slaughtered at the end of the first game whose daughter is out for revenge. That would explain how she’s so militarized. I get in the realm of believability, it could be the surgeon’s kid, but it feels like an element that’s inserted to be convenient for the story.
A Narrative More Messy than Spores and Overcrowded Than a Room Full of Infected
When we follow Abby’s path, the narrative starts to jumble itself, telling the story out of order. It goes from the present to the past, back to the present, back to the past. The game frequently revisits an aquarium where Abby is housed with her friends. When the game introduced its supporting cast, they didn’t leave much of a lasting memory for me. I knew there was Manny (Alejandro Edda), who spat on Joel’s corpse; Jesse (Stephen Chang), who’s the nice guy in Ellie’s group; Dina (Shannon Woodward), Ellie’s girlfriend; Owen (Patrick Fugit), Abby’s boyfriend; and Lev (Ian Alexander), a former member of a religious cult that tags along with Abby.
The characters are brilliantly performed. The actors play the material straight, and they all do their jobs fittingly. Not a single dramatic beat feels phoned in, nor a line of dialogue cheesy. The Last of Us Part II might be a video game, but everyone treats the material like it’s a play. Despite their incredible performances, the actors can’t help but get lost in the shuffle of a messy script. Many of the supporting characters, unlike the first game, I can’t remember. Nobody stands out like crazy but well-meaning Bill (W. Earl Brown) or the cynical Tess (Annie Wersching).
I ended up following who’s dating who rather than getting to know anyone. That’s the problem with new characters in sequels. Either you can add a few who help develop the characters we already know, or there are too many of them to keep the narrative cohesive. At one point in the game, Abby constantly refers to Isaac, her commanding officer at the WLF (Washington Liberation Front). We only meet Isaac once, which is a waste for such a talent like Jeffrey Wright. Yet nobody shuts up about him in the game. There were so many times I didn’t know who Isaac was because of the game’s overstuffed cast.
During what should have been a turning point, we learn that Abby’s friend, Mel (Ashly Burch), is pregnant. When Ellie catches up to Abby, Ellie kills Mel, unaware of her pregnancy until after the murder. You would think that would be something in the story where Ellie would think about her actions. But no. She’s still out to kill Abby. Ellie’s character doesn’t change much in The Last of Us Part II. Neither does Abby. Abby’s well-rounded, but she remains the same in the end. With so many characters and protagonists who don’t really develop, the writers lose sight of what made the first game so special.
The Missing Heart
The Last of Us worked because it was a story about two people whose relationship changes. Ellie went from being an independent loner kid to a daughter-like figure for Joel, a man who lost his child during the outbreak. The link between the two is strained for a huge chunk of the game’s campaign. After spending 15 hours with Joel and Ellie, we see the two become close. Because a video game’s format is intentionally long due to its hefty price tag, we’re allowed to spend a lot of time with these two characters. It’s a chemistry that can only be felt by playing a video game. You won’t get the same feeling from a compressed television show or a movie. The Last of Us Part II breaks the first game’s linear structure for a nonlinear story that’s supposed to make us heartbroken and angered by its twists. But it’s more of a dull cat-and-mouse game about catching prey instead of our emotions.
In The Last of Us Part II, our protagonist from the first game isn’t the central point of focus, which would be fine if the narrative wasn’t so all over the place. Much of Part II’s attention is centered on a new character, Abby. Abby is a well-intentioned woman who goes out of her way to help others. Like the way she puts her life on the line for Lev, a stranger who later becomes a friend. As was probably the writer’s intention, I found myself more invested in Abby than Ellie. But with so many supporting characters and a disconnected story, I didn’t find myself absorbed by Abby’s story the way I did with Joel and Ellie in the first game. Abby is three-dimensional, but she doesn’t have the charisma that young Ellie had from the first game. Little Ellie’s humor carried an otherwise hopeless game toward a beacon of light that kept me going. Abby’s a stilted individual who’s always either angry or sad. As is almost everyone else in the game. Furthermore, older Ellie is the same way, but worse.
Ellie is an embittered shell of her former self. She becomes the hateful person Joel had been. All that hate leaves little room for character growth. Everyone wants to just kill until the cows come home. When I’ve slit hundreds of people’s throats, blew them up, stabbed them to death, shot them, or choked them for countless hours, I have a numbness to the game’s violence. Hate is a strong theme. But it can be a limited one.
The Easy Way Out
Ellie’s insistence on revenge leads her to a life of isolation. In the game’s final encounter, Ellie takes on a starved and tortured Abby. As you’re smashing the controller to strangle her, Ellie lets Abby go. It’s a weak moment in screenwriting that takes the easy option out. Ellie is regretful of her actions. Seeing that killing Abby won’t change anything, Ellie releases her from her grip. As I said before, maybe when Ellie killed pregnant Mel, she could have learned that revenge is pointless. If she’s that mentally gone, it makes no sense that Ellie stops when she’s in her moment of triumph.
It’s a cliché path where the protagonist decides they’re too good to kill in cold blood. When Ellie goes home, her partner Dina is gone, along with her kid, leaving Ellie with nothing but her thoughts. That scene would have hit much harder if Ellie killed Abby and then still came home to nothing. It wouldn’t have saved the narrative, but it would have sealed the whole cycle of violence theme nicely, even if it was still a dull one in the first place.
Still a Fun Video Game
There’s almost no shred of love or hope in The Last of Us Part II. Even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road had a hopeful ending. I understand Neil Druckmann was investing in a desperate story about the pointlessness of hate. But without love, the script loses its drive. I’m not motivated to kill Abby or Ellie. Maybe that’s the point. Some players will be furious about what happened to Joel and will want revenge; others will not want to take part in the carnage but have to. For me, it’s fun to go on a quiet killing spree. But am I supposed to feel like I’m having fun? As in, I’m the killer and am enjoying my bloodlust when I shouldn’t be? Is the player secretly getting shamed by Neil Druckmann’s team of writers and directors for enjoying a piece of entertainment aimed at satisfying the dopamine in their brains? If so, then wrong format.
If you’re going to make a tale about the horrors of violence then it’s probably best not to put in a video game that’s aimed to be entertaining. While you play as Ellie or Abby while going on a killing spree, the game is designed to be fun. The player is supposed to feel rewarded for stealthily taking out NPCs (nonplayable characters) without being detected. It’s ironic since the game is supposed to disgust the player with its violence. But how can it be repulsive when it’s so fun? At one point in the game, Abby’s locked in a hospital basement with a gigantic infected zombie that looks like something straight from Resident Evil 4. How am I supposed to take the anti-violence angle so seriously when I’m fighting a boss that looks like a Las Plagas parasite? Sure, there were the bloaters in The Last of Us who were similar, but they still looked tangible enough that they were still terrifying.
A Noble, But Failed Effort
To its credit, The Last of Us Part II is a noble effort in trying to do something different. It didn’t just make a fan service sequel where Ellie gives herself as the cure to humanity. The Last of Us Part II makes the player question their barbaric actions. Unfortunately, it’s a hollow tale that doesn’t know how to build its characters, only leaving us feeling as empty as Ellie in the end. No matter how many flashbacks there are to Ellie and Joel’s changing relationship, it can’t save the game from its central plot, which is too angry to generate any real feelings. How this could interpret itself into a television series in Season 2 for the HBO show could work better than the game. The viewer won’t be spending 20-30 hours just killing people. Also the narrative can be arranged to be more linear. Unlike the game, the HBO series’s showrunners will have to grow its characters beyond merely the thirst for revenge to keep audiences hooked.
