A masterpiece…for an acquired taste.
CONTAINS SPOILERS
When I finished Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II, I cried. Not because of the ending but because I had just finished a game that is a sequel to one of my most precious games, and it was just as perfect. Part II is a traditional, formulaic yet masterfully executed tragic story filled with thematic resonance. It's a treatise on love and forgiveness. On growth. On promises. On living with guilt. It is a game that will crawl under your skin and won’t get out. It will move slow and with purpose to its inevitable ending, causing you agony along the way until it finally decides to burst out, abandoning you to live with the pain alone.
Before I dive into it further, for those of you who don't know, here is the official description of the game:
Five years after their dangerous journey across the post-pandemic United States, Ellie and Joel have settled down in Jackson, Wyoming. Living amongst a thriving community of survivors has allowed them peace and stability, despite the constant threat of the infected and other, more desperate survivors. When a violent event disrupts that peace, Ellie embarks on a relentless journey to carry out justice and find closure. As she hunts those responsible one by one, she is confronted with the devastating physical and emotional repercussions of her actions.
There are three things that pop in my head when I think about Part II:
ONE, is that I completely loved every second of it.
TWO, is that Naughty Dog spoiled the game for me.
THREE, is that the story has nothing to say.
ONE: I completely loved every second of it.
What made me absolutely adore the game was how the gameplay breathes life into the story and serves it so well. It does that using thematic resonance, particularly symbolism, parallelism and motifs which connect various aspects of Part II, but also connect Part II with Part I.
Thematic resonance means to thematically mirror and reinforce the main plot’s theme with every storytelling device the creator has. Every element of the story, and in this case gameplay, needs to support the theme in some meaningful way. And Part II does that splendidly.
Starting with the most cold-blooded and brutal combat design I have ever experienced in a game. The sheer violence of the gameplay exists to support the emotional turmoil the characters are going through. Everything about the combat design has been created with violence as a focal point. Doom has violence, God of War has violence; the majority of games are combat based but what Part II does, and it does so well, is it puts the spotlight on how raw violence can be and does this for story purposes. I want to explain that a bit because there is the discourse of "I know violence is bad, I don’t need a game to tell me" and that is absolutely right but that’s not what the gameplay does, nor even the story. It’s not there to tell the player that violence is bad, it’s there to highlight the amount of sometimes necessary violence in a world where society has fallen apart. It’s not there to make the player feel bad, it’s there to make the characters of the story feel bad. The violence in the game is causing lasting trauma on the characters of the story and in order to sell that to the players, the gameplay had to represent that.
One other very interesting theme that can be seen through the gameplay is the connection to the philosophical Other and community. In gameplay terms, I am talking about the names used by the enemy AI when they call or talk to each other. When the player stealth-kills one enemy, another might go looking for their friend and call out their name. If the player kills them in plain sight they will scream their friend’s name before attacking. It is very successful as every NPC feels alive. I’ve long been saying that we need to assign names to our more generic AI characters because names are personal, therefore they immediately create a connection with the player. Prey (2017) does an amazing job of assigning a name to all of the crew members on Talos I. It can then create documentation with those names, create side quests including them, and create its own stories about them. The names give character and having them in Part II for the enemies serves the idea that the player is dealing with real people and taking their lives. But how does that serve the story? When Ellie murders the people she set out to kill they are, initially, for the player nameless. Players don’t have a connection to them. Later on when you play as Abby, you get to know them and suddenly they aren’t nameless anymore. They are actual people with imperfect lives. Somebody loves them, they live together as a community, they fight to survive just like the people Ellie surrounds herself with. So it would only be fair to play with this idea in the gameplay too. Everyone is someone both in the story and gameplay. Everyone has a name.
On of my favourite ways the gameplay works for the story, is actually through the different mechanics available for the player at different sections of the story. The theme of symbolism can be found a lot in this idea. For example, Ellie is very different from Joel and it was important to show this both through gameplay and story. In regards to the gameplay she has a knife that provides easy stealth kills, she doesn’t use an excessive amount of ladders or planks to reach areas and her melee attacks revolve around her knife. She is different that Joel because her journey path was different than Joel’s. It is a path of resolution.
You play with these mechanics for most of the game until you get to play with Abby. Now Abby was meant to resemble Joel, again, both in gameplay and story. The gameplay accomplishes that through the new mechanics the player gets. Abby is able to craft shivs just like Joel, she is stealth choking the enemies in the same way Joel stealth killed them, she is using ladders to reach other areas, she is punching her way through the enemies, she is stomping them on the head, hell, the developers even give her a flamethrower! Those gameplay details are meant to remind you of Joel because Abby’s story arc is meant to remind you of Joel. Unlike Ellie’s journey, Abby’s journey is on the same path as Joel’s. It is a path of redemption.
Abby and Joel's very similar stealth kills.
One more prominent gameplay feature that additionally acts as a motif and is one of my favourite examples in video games of how mechanics directly connect with the story, is the ability to play the guitar. Joel has mentioned to Ellie in Part I that "Once we're done with this whole thing" he would teach her to play the guitar. What is extremely alluring is that Part II begins with a guitar and ends with a guitar. In the beginning we see Ellie agreeing to learn the guitar and years later throughout the gameplay we are able to play the guitar ourselves using a simple but a remarkable mechanic Naughty Dog crafted just for this. The player can find it in multiple moments throughout their playthrough and can choose to use it. Those moments were by far the most emotional moments in the game for me. By the end of the game, an object that meant so much to Ellie and connected her to Joel in the most loving way, is now something she can’t use anymore. Her two fingers (which incidentally are the same ones she holds at the end of Part I) are gone now. The bittersweet melody that once was the memory of Joel is now broken. The idea of the player using the guitar to remind themselves of Joel throughout the game is fascinating, but it becomes even more important when in the end that strong emotional bond breaks and drags down the characters with it.
Another aspect I would like to mention is the parallelism of story and gameplay which can be seen particularly through the level design. The level design proved to be one of the most useful tools in selling the story arc of the game. Apart from it being superb in its design it furthermore entwines Ellie’s story and Abby’s. You get to see this magic, which can only happen in this medium, when you get to play as Abby as you go to locations that Ellie has been or will be at later on. Whether it’s the exact same location or an area around it, you can’t help but feel the connection those two characters have. They are so close and yet so far, sometimes missing each other by moments. When you play as Abby and you go through an area thinking "I played with Ellie here before and killed everybody that Abby interacts with", it can be a powerful moment. That’s why a second playthrough of the game, makes this entangled storytelling even more special. Playing as Ellie on a second playthrough you start thinking the other way around "I played as Abby here before and interacted with all these people that I’m about to kill". And that is such a compelling storytelling device that only games can pull off. It is a chef d'oeuvre in parallelism that works extremely well when you put it all together.
TWO: Naughty Dog spoiled the game for me
I cannot overstate how much I loved the game. In every way it excelled and blew the waters regardless of its formulaic and traditional approach to games. But because of that….Naughty Dog spoiled it for me. When they publically first talked about the main plot of Part II, most aspects of it were immediately revealed to me. And this is important not just for me and you’ll see why soon. Here are the some excerpts of what was said:
"With society broken down, how far would you go for justice?" Druckmann says. "How much would it consume you? How much would it take away from your humanity? How much would it destroy your relationships? The question now becomes, if someone does harm to someone you love, how far are you going to go to get revenge? How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice as you bring the people responsible to justice? Is there any coming back from this emotion around revenge?"
Alongside that and an official description (the same one from the beginning of the article), a trailer was also shown and it was a trailer that introduced Abby. This information makes it apparent that there will be focus on other characters too. As Halley Gross (Co-Writer) explained in an interview later on, it was important to do justice for all characters. So putting all of this information together, here what was revealed to me:
Joel would die
You would play as Abby
At that moment in time, Joel is the only person in Ellie’s life that she deeply loves and has a complicated relationship with. And he is the only person in our lives that we love just as much. In order for Ellie to set out alone on a journey, it meant Joel had to die. I know Naughty Dog tried to cover this by having Joel in the trailers or try to make it look like Dina would be the one to die, but if you know the company, you also know that they go to great lengths to lie about the story in their trailers. These "lies" didn’t reassure me that Joel was alive. Naughty Dog has a very specific formula for storytelling. It only made sense that Joel would die. Because it is the only honest answer. Even though they never directly revealed that you play as Abby, focusing entirely on her in a trailer, saying that all characters must be explored and the fact that Naughty Dog is famously known since at least 2013 to make the player control different characters apart from the main character (Sarah and Ellie in Part I, Sam and Cassie in Uncharted 4), it only made sense you would play as this character.
Now, why is this important? Because this shows just how predictable the plot and game is. Don’t get me wrong, the context and the journey itself is more important than plot revelations but at this point I wish Naughty Dog improved their storytelling formula. It is traditional, predictable and doesn’t allow them to innovate their gameplay in any way. On one hand, I love it because I can launch a Naughty Dog game at any time and play it without any commitment – there is no inventory to manage, no crazy mechanics to get used to, no huge and distracting amount of content that takes away from the flow, no befuddling UI and menus, no overwhelming choice in what to do and how to do it. Their games are easy to get into and enjoy some of the best performed stories presented in the highest quality possible in the gaming industry. On the other hand, this formula can become stale and if you are someone who does not enjoy it or wishes it innovated or learned from other games, then it is extremely disappointing. I am one of those people that obviously like it. But I can see the flaws and those flaws have directly impacted me in Part II. Because of that formula, Naughty Dog spoiled the game for me. For the first 16 hours I journeyed with Ellie as she kills every NPC, and murders supporting characters in cutscenes, waiting until the moment arrived where I would play as Abby. Playing with her within the first hour of the game also confirmed that the player would indeed play with her later on. The game wants to show her part of the story and I was down with that idea but it felt like for the first half of the game I was just waiting for that to happen and wait for the story to finally unfold and reveal what it really wanted from me. It didn’t help that the gameplay and mechanics at that point weren’t fully entwined with the story’s message. Part II is the kind of game where everything comes together in the end. Everything makes sense once you finish it. But it’s a long road there and you have to be on-board with it.
THREE: The story has nothing to say
"I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone pushed you, or you saw a video of someone torturing an animal, and even for a split second, you’ve thought: I want to make this person pay. And that’s part of the research that we’ve done."
No. I actually never felt this much hate or anger in my life. I have, but not enough to make me want to hurt anyone. Not like Ellie and Abby do. I hurt people in the past, didn’t we all at one point, but hate doesn’t govern me. I am not constantly angry or hateful that I would go to great lengths to destroy another person. Not like Ellie and Abby do. Maybe that’s just me but I have a feeling that most people around the world have felt more care, compassion and love during their lives rather than hate and anger. I am of course generalizing but the idea still stands: getting someone to empathize with hate is a lot harder than getting someone to empathize with love. And that is the core problem with the plot of Part II. It’s interesting to ask that question but it is nearly impossible to ask that question to the audience. It can therefore only be confined to the characters. The question of "how far will you go to save/make happy/protect someone you love" is a question that philosophy has asked countless of times throughout the years and one we ask ourselves in our everyday lives, sometimes quite often. It is ingrained in our psychology. Parents ask and answer that question daily when it comes to their children. It is relatable because most of us have or had a friend we love, a partner we love, a pet we love. The question “how far will you go to take revenge” simply does not bare the same weight.
Where Part I asked the question of "save humanity or save someone you love" and then reverted our shallow expectations, in Part II we don’t see that. Part I presents the player with ethical debates and universal themes throughout the whole game. The ultimate Trolley Problem at the end of the game, Henry committing suicide because he lost the one person he loved, Sarah dying because a soldier followed orders, Bill living alone because attachment is dangerous…every part of their individual stories asks the player personal questions. Is dooming the world to save the one you love the right thing to do? Is living in a world when your loved one dies even possible? Is following orders no matter what the consequence, okay? Is isolating yourself forever really an answer?
Part I deals with themes like vanity, harsh truths and melancholy in a hauntingly beautiful and personal way throughout its whole journey. Part II has none of that because all the questions the game asks are not personal to the player but to the characters, they were rooted in Ellie, Abby and the supporting cast. I understand why Ellie and Abby do the things they do but I cannot feel them. I just go along with them. The journey Ellie takes isn’t the one we take. It's the one we come along with as an outsider.
Nevertheless, the story does have glimpses of that but mainly at the end, and that is because it finally confesses what it was all about. This wasn’t a story about hate after all. Ellie’s and Joel’s last cutscene reveals that Ellie wanted to forgive Joel but that chance was taken away from her the next day when Joel was brutally murdered. Ellie’s personality has one core characteristic and is that she doesn’t let things go. Since Left Behind we saw her go to great lengths to find an answer. To her immunity, to her existence, to her life’s meaning. "Everything that I’ve done…can’t be for nothing". Ellie pushes and doesn’t let go. It’s an obsession that drives her not anger. In no part throughout the game she seems like an enraged person fuelled with hate. She seems determined, hurt and restless.
When she lives at the farm with Dina and then decides to go after Abby one more time it’s because "it can’t be for nothing". She went after Abby because there was no resolution to her forgiveness. That chance has vanished. And her mind is on that path no matter where she is or what she does. And so she tries to find an answer one more time but when she is just about to kill Abby she realizes it’s not what she wanted all along. It’s why she sees Joel’s face from their last moment together. Not when he is bleeding and beaten to death like her nightmares and trauma often remind her, but when she was about to start forgiving him. That is what she truly wants and killing Abby won’t provide that. Maybe letting go of Abby was a way of forgiving her and in that way she also forgave Joel. She returns back home to the farm only to find no one there. The last item she interacts with is her guitar which she cannot play anymore due to her missing fingers. The price she paid because of her obsession. Throughout her life she asks herself if it’s all for nothing. How many times can she say that until she is left with nothing? Did she reach that point? She lost her partner, her life, her child. How much has this obsession cost her? The need to resolve something she can’t resolve. She goes to these obscene lengths in Part I and in Part II and nothing is ever resolved for her. How far would you go to find resolution if your loved one died? How much would it destroy you inside if you never said what you wished to say before someone you loved passed away? How many times you wished you had one more chance to talk to the ones you lost?
This was never a story about violence or hate. It was a story about love. And that last question, was a question worth asking. It wasn’t all for nothing…
Quick THOUGHTS
The Last of Us Part II is worth buying.
The Last of Us Part II is a superb single-player linear game.
The Last of Us Part II gameplay is nothing new but it is extremely well polished.
The Last of Us Part II is an ideal game to study level design and narrative.
The Last of Us Part II is a slow burn and a long game.
The Last of Us Part II is the best looking game in 2020.
The Last of Us Part II is a tale of tragedy therefore the story and plot are for speficic audiences.
The Last of Us Part II is an unforgettable emotional and tragic journey worth experiencing.