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The Last of Us Part II


DisturbedSwan
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Well, I'm still sticking with it, around 24 hrs played and now :

Spoiler

Playing as Abbie, and just finished the section with Owen where you do the bow & arrow target 'challenge'.

 

It still all feels a bit 'average' in terms of gameplay & story, but hope to see how it all ties together, eventually.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well there was no way the second half would win you over if the first one left you cold.

 

I'm glad it got made, and told, and I'm one of those people who were heavily sceptical upon its announcement. It was the most tense gameplay experience I've had since Alien Isolation (for different reasons though), the type of game that made me forget I'm holding a gamepad and sitting in front of a TV. For all the talk about Naughty Dog's cinematography, I think the best moments here happen while playing it.

 

But to each his own. If it didn't click (haha) for you, then that's just the way it is.

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yeah, for me the story and world carried the first game, the gameplay and tension carried the story of this one. I think it's the best thing Naughty Dog have ever put out, but I can certainly understand why someone wouldn't feel the same

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On 12/07/2021 at 12:53, shinymcshine said:

It's been 45 hrs, and a story which perhaps didn't really even need to be told, but I've finished it.

I enjoyed the game a lot, but did  feel there were a couple of woke elements that felt forced IMO.

 

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For me, it was more the story of two people on a blinkered mission of revenge, completed oblivious to the atrocities they caused in pursuit of their own agenda - unconcerned with the number of people (with their own, unspoken friends and families) who made up the cannon fodder 'threat' - but those lives are ignored as each was the respective 'baddie' in the best/worst Hollywood style.

 

Sure, neither protagonist really got a 'ride off into the sunset' ending, but I don't think the consequences of their actions were well scripted (i.e. you could equally now make 100 games where friends/family of Ellie & Abbie's 'victims' hunted those two down.....).

 

So in that context, I don't really think the main storyline made an awful lot of sense, it was just like the Nathan Drake or Lara Croft principles rehashed, so, for me it was a rather lazy and unnecessary projection of Ellie's story.

 

Perhaps had they added a basic 'chaos' system, like Dishonored, where killing zombies was okay, but killing humans had consequences, might have made it more palatable.

 

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Each to their own, but I thought it did quite a good job of showing what it's cost both of them 

 

I'm rolling my eyes at the 'woke' comment, but I've said before (repeating myself, sorry) that 2 of the sides are fleshed out, believably or not, while the 3rd side are really easy to other, there's no real good side to them 

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  • 2 years later...

Ok. So the Remaster came out today. It is admittedly difficult to see what improvements have been made, graphically. I certainly wouldn’t have paid £40/50 for it. But at £10, and that was paid using via PlayStation Stars credit, I thought “fair enough”. 
 

There is a new rogue-like mode added, but I’ve not tried that out just yet. 

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Ok. So I finally got around to trying out the new ‘No Return’ mode. And it’s really bloody good.

 

It’s a ‘rogue-like” (because what isn’t these days). You can choose between 2 characters, Ellie or Abbie. The first round you get put into, is called ‘Assault’. You get about 30 seconds to quickly scout around the area, to grab some supplies for crafting items (med kits, petrol bombs). Then, the first wave of enemies, 3 soldiers, appears. They hunt you down, much like they do in the main game. As you’ll only have a pistol and melee weapon, you’re best off sneaking about, killing them one by one. When all 3 of them are dead, a supply crate appears, and another 30 second timer kicks in,  before wave 2 arrives. Clear 3 waves of that, and you return to the ‘safe house’ hub. When you finish a level, you get rewarded scrap, and other stuff, to use for upgrades, depending on how well you did. You can spend your scrap at the workshop to improve your weapons. And buy new weapons from the safe house store. Then, it’s your choice which mission you do next. The next round I did, was called Hunted. Here, you were with a random AI controlled ally, and have to kill as many enemies as possible, in a short time frame. The more kills you get, the more currency you’re rewarded with. 
 

After about 5 levels, you go up against a Boss. Kill that, the run ends, and you’ll unlock more characters. Each character apparently has different stats, but you only have two to choose from to begin with.
 

There’s in-game challenges, that reward you as you complete them. Also, some missions contain ‘mods’, that impact how they play. One later level, where the enemies were Infected rather than soldiers, was filled with trip wires. I had to be careful not to detonate them. But the infected often ran straight into them, leading to some easy kills. Another mod rewarded me with health for every melee kill that I did. 
 

You can choose your difficulty before the run, the higher you choose, the more scrap/gear you can unlock.

 

Now, God Of War recently had a free rogue like expansion, Valhalla. I tried that, but didn’t really like it. And that’s because the combat in GOW has a bit too much going on for my liking. Hold down this button, press this for a combo. True, I hadn’t played the game since I finished the main story over a year ago. But, the game didn’t do a great job of explaining how to actually play it. 
 

In comparison, the combat in TLOU2 is just much more satisfying, and easier to get to grips with. 
 

So yeah. This is bloody awesome.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Did  quick run thru of the first game and I've fired this up and paid a tenner for the remaster upgrade. 

 

What a great game this is, maybe one of the most complete story driven games ever made. It's possibly a little less gamey than 1 in that the world itself is the star of the show and they've been confident enough to lay back on the standard tropes like the 'sniper section,' or the end of level boss. It's you up against the world and the people in it violently staking their claim.

 

I love it, and I always did love it. I never understood the complaints about the 'set up,' when it came out.

 

Spoiler

I always hate having to do that stupid shit at the end of the first one, and if anyone deserves a hard death in this world it's that murdering cunt Joel. 

 

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I kind of get the idea that if you're really invested in a story and the fate of your favourite character doesn't really align with what you were hoping for, that it can be disappointing at first. But if it's justified narratively and comes from a place of genuineness, which I think it is in this case, then I say just let that story be that story.

 

But people just go way overboard with this stuff and sometimes have a rather unhealthy attachment to polygon characters. It's currently happening with the Suicide Squad game, too (though I suppose there's a bigger legacy to account for in that case).

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I think a lot of it is down to clicks and likes these days. Bandwagon jumping and phoney outrage can be profitable at the top end of social media, and gratifying on the lower rungs.

 

It's too simple a designation to call people sheep these days. The addictive quality of airing a view and having it read and applauded seems a reward in itself. And it's causing all kinds of mayhem in the arts, in sport and politics too.

 

Last of us 2 was amusing because it actually felt people were, without irony, considering themselves 'victims' of fiction.

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I'm not a big fan of this game, but I think in modern pop culture criticism or 'consumption' there is this throughline of anti-intellectualism, that will look at things at the literal event level and is obsessed with 'plot holes'* and unexplainable character behaviours that latch onto things like this and get angry about it. People for whom games and films and comics and whatever media are part of a personal identity building exercise for them, where only the surface level of a text exists and if it contains things they don't like, well it's obviously taken to a personal level because of this unhealthy ownership of it and lack of trust in the creative decisions made

 

They're an easy audience to feed the beast, so to speak, when a thing like that becomes a culture war. And like, it's also fine to just engage with the literal level of a text, but it makes you a fool if you go on these tirades. A lot of people aren't really willing to look for the reasons why a scene is done a certain way in a film or a video game, or trust the decision to include by the game director or screenwriter or whoever, just the fact that it happened and their gut instinct is all they trust. So they lash out 

 

The problem isn't people being negative or anything like that, being negative is fine if it comes from an informed place (and to be clear my overall opinion on TLOU2 is kinda negative). It's just Dunning Krueger shit, angry people too stupid to know how stupid they are

 

*I don't mean that plot holes can't be a real flaw with something either, this isn't trying to be a sweeping statement but I mean more like how someone will hate something entirely cause of a list of things they consider plot holes. Like cinema sins level criticism

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Speaking of game director, doesn't the PS5 'upgrade' include developer commentary? I doubt there's a commentary track for the entire game considering how long it is, but I imagine it's available for the most pivotal scenes, so that could be pretty interesting to go through if you have the game. For those like me who don't, I hope it'll appear on youtube at some point.

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I know you don't mean it that way (at least I hope you dont) but that post doesn't half come across as a "everyone is stupider than me" comment.😂

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6 minutes ago, Nag said:

I know you don't mean it that way (at least I hope you dont) but that post doesn't half come across as a "everyone is stupider than me" comment.😂

Well I'm sorry that's the impression I gave cause I didn't want it to sound pretentious

 

But ultimately yeah I'm talking about things like themes, subtext, metaphors, character arcs and the way all that stuff comes together. How scenes and storylines synthesise. There's kinda no way to get into that and the culture wars that bubble up around popular media without coming across flowery, that's the best I could attempt. It's how I write my posts so I dunno 🤷‍♂️ 

 

Ultimately my issue is with people not really giving creator's benefit of the doubt and rushing to (angry) judgement without even thinking about what they're looking at. I don't think that describes anyone on here

 

 

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That's fine... I know how you like to get in to those sides of things.

 

And for those that don't I think that's fine too... not to the extent of rushing to the Internet to rant and rave and then send abusive Twitter messages to devs of course.

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Sure, I didn't intend to give the impression there's a right and wrong way to read the text and I can see how it comes across like that. If I would reword it I'd say that there is a reactionary way of looking at media that leads into a lot of the social media outrage stuff and even abusive behaviour

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