Board 8 > **SPOILER TOPIC** The Last of Us Part 2 **SPOILERS**

(+) Yeah! (+)

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

This scene is still so fucking weird to me. Like we don't even know what this dude says until the last half hour of the game. And he's trying to apologize and then Ellie is having none of it, acting like a brat about it, all sullen with her head down and barely listening, and then Maria is just like "Thank you for doing that." FOR DOING WHAT? You didn't let anything be resolved! You refused to even talk it out at all! It wasn't like this guy was half-assing his apology or anything. He even gave you a gift and said he hopes you're safe in the barren zombie hellscape. He seemed like he was being legitimate.

There's just so many small disconnects like this that floor me. If you're going to have this scene, at least have him seem like he's not really all too sorry or establish he's kind of the town asshole.

https://youtu.be/6wIERnc-HDo

The guy offered fucking steaks over something that really shouldn't be a big deal to Ellie at this point especially given the circumstances. She was just being a bitch there.

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Holy shit Kojima Productions just savaged this game.

https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/650979-kojima-productions-the-last-of-us-2-facebook-death-stranding

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHLuk1Q10cU

Just finished the game. Going to read up on this topic and other topic now.

I will probably disagree with a lot of what I see you say, Biscuit.

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yeah never mind I'm peaceing out

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probably wise

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Should I come to your topic XIII?

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jesus
I thought this WAS my topic
whoops

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like literally did a double take after I saw that post
(also, yes, sure)

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Wait what did I miss

And yeah Biscuit gets a little... obsessive.

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Nothing too bad. I was just setting the stage for summarizing why I disagreed, but upon reading the topic more, realized it wasn't worth getting into.

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yeah.

my comments in this topic are basically just me theorizing about why so many people are infuriated by the spoilers. I've tried to avoid making judgments about the game's quality in favor of just talking generally about story crafting and gameplay. I still plan on buying the game and playing it someday (relatively) soon.

Yeah I just went and properly read through the first page of this topic for the first time and yikes

This stuff is just taken so severely out of context and it's a shame that it led to stuff like Moogle's post saying he "definitely isn't going to buy this game"

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I dont think theres any context that could turn me around on this, im just not interested in something that seems so incredibly depressing.
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Yeah, I have zero doubt the presentation and the performances are well crafted because it's Naughty Dog, but I have no interest in the story they're trying to tell and even less in the way they're attempting to tell it.

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MoogleKupo141 posted...

I dont think theres any context that could turn me around on this, im just not interested in something that seems so incredibly depressing.

I personally think the ending has a kind of triumph to it, though it is tremendously bittersweet

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Leonhart4 posted...

Yeah, I have zero doubt the presentation and the performances are well crafted because it's Naughty Dog, but I have no interest in the story they're trying to tell and even less in the way they're attempting to tell it.

To be fair, if you read this topic, you probably don't have a good idea of what the story they're trying to tell is.

I think the gist of what I've seen since finishing the game is that people are trying to build a 1000 piece puzzles with 100 pieces, and based on those pieces they've decided they hate the puzzle. Then, as they find more and more pieces, they just stick with their set notions.

I'd be curious to see someone who decided they hate the game when they saw the leaks, then came around to it. But I doubt that kind of person would be very easy to find.

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I doubt you could find the opposite person who was determined to like the game and wound up hating it either. The lines were drawn in the sand before the game came out.

I wasn't even that fond of the first game by the time I was done with it, and this feels like they turned it up to 11.

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Honestly, even just seeing the cutscenes - even all of the cutscenes - doesn't really do it justice because the dialogue during the gameplay, all the little character stuff ND does, feeling the struggle and the brutality of it all, etc, really brings it together.

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i'm now hearing the main "villains" in the game that had captured both ellie and Abby are religious zealots that specifically seek out homosexual / transexual people to torture and kill.

this is literally a tumblr fanfic with blockbuster budget.

Christ alive some of the stuff in this topic is fucking preposterous

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I just can't imagine sympathizing with Abby at any point and I really don't trust these writers to pull it off. The image in post 265 read like Baby's First Theme and based off everything I know, this thing is a 50 piece kids puzzle and the picture just says 'revenge bad'.

Which is really too bad because I loved the gameplay in the first game and was excited for more of it.

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I completely sympathised with Abby

Joel killed her father, who was armed with literally a scalpel vs an assault rifle, and who was working on a cure. What Joel did was uh...pretty damn bad even when you take out the guy he tortured to find out where Ellie was, the couple of dozen Fireflies he killed to get there, and then killing Marlene on the way out and lying to Ellie about it. And it was, you know, her dad.

I guess I just don't get how Ellie's thirst for revenge is justified and sympathetic, but Abby's somehow isn't.

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I've tried to be as neutral and objective as possible playing through the game. I love Naughty Dog and I've tried to give the chance.

And I honestly think presentation and performance only carries you so far. I don't think the game had a very interesting story to tell. I suppose it's a natural follow up to the events of the first game, but that doesn't make it good.

I'm enjoying playing through the game, because of gameplay mostly, but it's a problem when the flashback scenes are by far the best ones.

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Yeah, Joel really should've tortured the surgeon first. Maybe after the surgeon saved his life. Then he'd be cool.

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I don't like what Joel did in the ending, but I don't find roaring rampages of revenge all that appealing regardless of who's perpetrating them and they made an entire game of it with two separate characters.

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Robazoid posted...

Yeah, Joel really should've tortured the surgeon first. Maybe after the surgeon saved his life. Then he'd be cool.

I think you can interpret some of what Abby says/does after being saved by Joel as a small amount of internal conflict, but ultimately her desire for revenge outweighs that. I think the big thing here is the outside influences. Abby's group were all there for one purpose - to find and kill Joel. They were with her on that revenge mission, it was a team effort, and she'd spend years convincing herself that not only was Joel a monster for killing her father, but also a monster for dooming humanity. It felt righteous and the people she was with felt the same way. But later, when she comes to the theatre for her second revenge - against Ellie, for killing Owen and Mel - she stops at least in part because of Lev's more forgiving influence. The idea that Abby is supposed to forgive Joel doesn't wash with me at all - but it's also noticeable that she actually DOES feel guilty about that later. It's part of why she's so hell-bent on protecting Lev and Yara. She literally states as much when protecting Lev from Isaac at the end of the game.

The surgeon parallel you draw simply doesn't work at all.

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XIII_rocks posted...

I completely sympathised with Abby

Joel killed her father, who was armed with literally a scalpel vs an assault rifle, and who was working on a cure. What Joel did was uh...pretty damn bad even when you take out the guy he tortured to find out where Ellie was, the couple of dozen Fireflies he killed to get there, and then killing Marlene on the way out and lying to Ellie about it. And it was, you know, her dad.

I guess I just don't get how Ellie's thirst for revenge is justified and sympathetic, but Abby's somehow isn't.

The problem is that I did not enjoy playing through the hospital in the first game. I liked the ending, but I felt like I was going against my own belief then. Joel actually did it to save someone he cared for though, this game is basically about getting revenge.

I felt from the instant Ellie headed out that there was probably a good reason for Abby to act like she did and that I did not want to take revenge. Sympathizing with Abby does not mean she was very interesting character. The game wanted to show me the consequences of acting and a chain of violence but at no point during the game did I feel like that's what I wanted to do personally, so yeah I got the obvious point but could never truly relate.

It's completely true that judging a game from the leaks is wrong, because such leaks are misleading. But it's undermining people to think that they can not judge whether or not they'll like the game based on everything we knew about it before it came out. The continuation is obviously quite controversial. This plot was never going to be for everyone.

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Robazoid posted...

Yeah, Joel really should've tortured the surgeon first. Maybe after the surgeon saved his life. Then he'd be cool.

Well, I mean, Joel tortured a guy in the first game, and the argument could be made that those doctors and surgeons or at the very least the firefly's saved Ellie from drowning(of course after knocking Joel out). Then he went ahead and killed them all.

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I guess I just don't get how Ellie's thirst for revenge is justified and sympathetic, but Abby's somehow isn't.

Im not sure if Ellies revenge is anymore justified than Abbys, I just know Ellie is a character I already know and like and Abby is a rando who has hurt Ellie. Whether or not theyre logically morally different, on an emotional level it makes me not want to play as Abby.

It may be silly, but since games are a thing I theoretically control, I dont want to make the things that are going to happen in the game happen. When you give me control of Abby I want to just turn around and run her into the woods so she never bites off any fingers.
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I think you can interpret some of what Abby says/does after being saved by Joel as a small amount of internal conflict,

To clarify this, in that section between Joel saving her and her killing Joel, there's multiple shots of her face that I took to show at least some small amount of conflict, but whatever.

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Robazoid posted...

I just can't imagine sympathizing with Abby at any point and I really don't trust these writers to pull it off.

Can you imagine sympathizing with Ellie? She's way worse than Abby.

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HanOfTheNekos posted...

Can you imagine sympathizing with Ellie? She's way worse than Abby.

This is actually a great point. By the end of the game I was sympathizing more with Abby. Ellie comes off as the crazy one.

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Leonhart4 posted...

I doubt you could find the opposite person who was determined to like the game and wound up hating it either. The lines were drawn in the sand before the game came out.

I wasn't even that fond of the first game by the time I was done with it, and this feels like they turned it up to 11.

I think it'd be easier. Typically preconceived negative emotions are harder to overcome, whereas encountering something you straight up hate is not toooo hard to recognize. Somebody might be very excited for the game because they loved the story despite the gameplay of the first game... and when finding out the gameplay is more of the same, lose interest.

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I don't think explaining Abby's actions makes any difference. Again, the motives having reason was never in doubt and understanding and sympathizing with her does not mean you'll enjoy a playthrough with her.

This was always a make or break plotline, if that makes sense. The game would be controversial even without the leaks. FFVIIR showed people are capable of changing their view, if that wasn't obvious already. There's a lot of fans out there believing that the misleading leaks and slem SJW agenda is why people disliked the game, but that's forgetting to consider the chances this game took with their fans. Didn't ND themelves say at one point that some fans of the first game would dislike this? It shouldn't surprise anyone.

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MoogleKupo141 posted...

Im not sure if Ellies revenge is anymore justified than Abbys, I just know Ellie is a character I already know and like and Abby is a rando who has hurt Ellie. Whether or not theyre logically morally different, on an emotional level it makes me not want to play as Abby.

It may be silly, but since games are a thing I theoretically control, I dont want to make the things that are going to happen in the game happen. When you give me control of Abby I want to just turn around and run her into the woods so she never bites off any fingers.

I guess the difference here is that when you get to the Ellie boss fight - which is really good, even an improvement on the David fight in TLOU1 - and these QTEs happen and it looks like Abby might kill Ellie, and I was kind of reluctant to progress, I fucking loved that. I loved that I was genuinely scared that I might kill Ellie but I also couldn't look away or stop because I wanted to see what happened. The tension was unbelievable. I loved that the game made me reluctant as a player to act, but also was well-designed and had me invested enough that I couldn't not act. I didn't really want either of them to die, though yes, I prefer Ellie of the two. And while I do think the Abby section maybe went too long - mostly because you knew where it ended up so it could have done with being quicker, but then you might lose some of the good character stuff between Abby and Lev - it doing that made the buildup to that fight, and the fight itself, really intense.

But I have to say when Abby and Lev got back from the hell of that island having seen Yara killed and been in the middle of a full-fledged warzone, I did audibly sigh and say like "oh, Abby", knowing she would find Owen and Mel dead. She went through all seven circles, for a noble cause - even if the reasons behind it were mainly to do with assuaging her guilt over what she did to Joel, but that she felt such guilt is in itself sympathetic - and her reward was that her lover got killed. I think that dramatic irony, of knowing what she would find after what she just went through, was a really successful bit of storytelling and absolutely helped me sympathise with her.

It's also worth applying your post to the Genocide run in Undertale. Did you play it and, if so, did you fight and kill Undyne?

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The difference is that you actually do have a choice in Undertale. I had no desire to do a Genocide run, so I never did.

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Sorozone posted...

This is actually a great point. By the end of the game I was sympathizing more with Abby. Ellie comes off as the crazy one.

That's missing the point, a bit, though. Ellie is Abby. Just, Abby goes through that arc sooner.

They both pursued revenge at any cost, and all the better/more heroic/innocent characters (Jesse, Dina, Manny, Mel) all suffer for it. Difference is that Abby had her revenge at the beginning of the game. That's why she can let Ellie and Dina go. Her true beef isn't with them, and after she lost just about everything over the course of three days, she realizes that all that matters now is the one person left.

Ellie doesn't get her revenge until the end of the game. We don't get to see her move on from it, except to soak in the consequences of the final scenes.

ctesjbuvf posted...

I don't think explaining Abby's actions makes any difference. Again, the motives having reason was never in doubt and understanding and sympathizing with her does not mean you'll enjoy a playthrough with her.

Abby is uncomfortable, but when you see her going through Joel's arc from the first game, you grow invested. Not for her, but for Lev and Yara. Joel was never a good dude in the first game - everything good about him was through Ellie. Same deal with Abby.

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Yeah, I sympathize with Abby, but should I feel bad personally? I ran around that room trying to pick up Ellie without killing the doctor because I did not enjoy doing what I was forced to do then.

Symphasizing and liking are just two different things.

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The difference is that you actually do have a choice in Undertale. I had no desire to do a Genocide run, so I never did.

Me neither, but then it also gives you a sunshine and rainbows ending that was never possible in TLOU.

But that's not really a "difference" re what Moogle said, anyway. Moogle has chosen not to play TLOU2; did he also choose not to play the Genocide run in Undertale?

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Like, I get why Abby wants revenge. Joel killed her dad. I personally think the writers handled her revenge about as sloppily as possible (based off what I know, I admittedly haven't played the game) by having Joel save her and that not matter to her at all (oh an occasional look that might be inner conflict, big whoop) and by not having her and Joel talk about it at all (how great would it have been if she asked if Ellie even wanted to be saved? Uh oh Joel, your sins are coming back to bite you! Instead there's just nothing), but fine. Her lust for vengeance has a solid motive.

It's the cold-blooded torture I can't get past. Joel did it in the first game for information and he dispatched the two dudes right after. Anyone who tortures someone like that for their own satisfaction, I'm left thinking the person is just using their supposed vengeance as an excuse to vent their bloodlust. Anyone who does that is scum and I'm not interested in a story trying to redeem them after.

I don't know if Ellie set out to quickly kill Abby or if her goal was to torture her first as well, but at least that would be karmic retribution for what Abby had done and it wouldn't bug me as much.

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TLOU had an uncomfortable ending because that was the narrative. The story completely falls apart if Joel lets Ellie die.

In this game, Ellie's revenge tale would be completely worthless without the perspective from the other side.

I don't think this game feels as good to finish, but as I said in the other topic, there's more to think about than a glorified trolley problem.

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XIII_rocks posted...

Me neither, but then it also gives you a sunshine and rainbows ending that was never possible in TLOU.

But that's not really a "difference" re what Moogle said, anyway. Moogle has chosen not to play TLOU2; did he also choose not to play the Genocide run in Undertale?

I only did the nice guy playthrough of Undertale.
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ctesjbuvf posted...

Yeah, I sympathize with Abby, but should I feel bad personally? I ran around that room trying to pick up Ellie without killing the doctor because I did not enjoy doing what I was forced to do then.

Surely the fact that you're asking this question is a sign it's working to at least some extent? You feel the need to question and defend your past actions. I think there's this take towards Druckmann/ND where people think they're saying "fuck you for your violent tendencies, feel bad about this all the time you bastards" and I don't think it's as hostile as that.

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You should all play Nier.

The first one, I mean.

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HanOfTheNekos posted...

In this game, Ellie's revenge tale would be completely worthless without the perspective from the other side.

While this is true, I don't think the game ever had a good story to tell to begin with, and it's a problem that nothing from this story had me particularly hooked.

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Abby didn't "cold-blooded torture" Joel, she beat the shit out of him and decided not to kill him right away.

Theoretically, if Ellie never showed up, it's possible she lets Joel live.

Her not letting Joel go after saving her is also a theme that's touched on later in the game multiple times. Her entire portion of the game is about helping people who saved her life, and she speaks often on the guilt. She still has nightmares about finding her dad dead. She knows killing Joel didn't help solve those. It's why she works so well as a parallel to Ellie who hasn't found her revenge yet.

Edit: this is a response to @Robazoid

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HanOfTheNekos posted...

Theoretically, if Ellie never showed up, it's possible she lets Joel live.

I find this very very unlikely for the record

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XIII_rocks posted...

I find this very very unlikely for the record

I think it's unlikely too. I mean, Mel didn't really want to be there, Owen was arguing for them to turn back, Manny supported Joel getting his comeuppance for murdering all the Fireflies... variety of voices involved.

But Ellie showing up at the very least rushed them to finish up the job.

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Also yeah it's a classic story of thinking revenge would bring you satisfaction but it just piled on more guilt. You think you want to cause this person pain, to torture them, you think they deserve it, your friends all think they deserve it, but then you finally do it and it traumatizes you in ways you didn't expect. You think it's the right thing to do, you justify it to yourself, but no amount of rationalizing makes you feel any better about it. Abby projects that anguish back onto Mel during the section you play alongside her.

Also worth noting that Abby, upon satisfying her revenge, doesn't feel any more bloodlust and stops them killing Ellie and Tommy.

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Also that all of their friends suffered because of their desire for revenge.


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