7/22
Coming off a weekend that featured a marathon The Last of Us 2 session to close the game out, I found myself confused. It wasn't because of the plot, either. No, something else I expected was still missing: the context for the uproar the story leaks caused. I avoided what they contained but I started this game knowing a lot of people in the gamerverse were upset about it for... well, reasons. For the duration of my play through, I assumed there would be a moment I would recognize as the thing everyone had to have been talking about. I waited 20+ hours and it never happened.
I'm not going to dance around spoilers here so heed the warning.
Sure, Naughty Dog made some bold decisions with its storytelling—killing Joel early, making Ellie unlikable, telling a very dark story, and most things Abby related. They shocked around most corners but they did it in service of the game's central themes. Naughty Dog wanted to humanize as many people as possible, be relentless with their usage and critique of violence, and minimize happy outcomes.
Removing Joel feels the easiest to defend because it's more a decision to further define what the franchise's identity is. In the original Last of Us, that 'Us' represented two opposites to the player: what remained of humanity and the pair of Joel and Ellie. In the sequel, the 'Us' is bigger. We see that in the beginning with the Jackson settlement and then later with the Wolves and Seraphites. Another romp through America with Joel and Ellie would have immortalized them as the franchise's central figures. Removing Joel tells the player that these specific characters won't always be what the franchise is about. For now, sure, but maybe not later. Even if you don't care about franchise decisions, Joel having to pay for his decision at the end of the last game shouldn't feel wrong given the context of the game world.
With Joel out of the way, that left Ellie to bear the weight of the story. I was not expecting to dislike her as much as I did when I put the controller down. I was indifferent in her late story high stakes moments; I knew she deserved anything bad that might happen to her. Yes, that's dark but it serves the theme. Ellie's thirst for vengeance is for her and following that choice to its natural end doesn't often feel good to the player. And that's important.
Abby feels like the biggest reason to be upset. She's the one who kills Joel, her backstory is long and starts at a moment of high tension, and her relationship with Lev is an homage to Joel and Ellie's from the original. I'm not going to refute the reasons to dislike her; most of them are valid to me. Besides, it's moot. The point is for us to have many reasons to like and dislike as many of these characters as possible. Abby's difference is she serves the game's themes most obviously. Her relationships with Yara and Lev develop rather quickly (and conveniently), for example. While I found myself on team Abby by the end of the game, I understood that was a decision Naughty Dog allowed me to make instead of forcing a definitive perspective on the player.
My final assessment is that the negative reaction was to two different things: first, the expectations of being a sequel; second, a poor representation of the final product. The first is simpler and you're going to confront it with any sequel. Should consumers get more of the same or something different? You can't win both sides. The second is a symptom of reading rather than experiencing the story. Naughty Dog does such an expert job involving the player in key story moments that it's impossible to properly communicate in a written synopsis. The relationship they create between story and gameplay just doesn't translate. While my feelings about the game aren't easy to sum up, one of the qualities I celebrate it most for is how well it uses its medium to tell its story.