I guess I can start by saying that it all makes sense now. I have friends who played The Last of Us Part II pre-release and were embargoed from discussing anything plot-related even though said plot was leaked in its entirety a month or so prior. Sony is notoriously protective of their first-party games, to the point that (if a writer on my Twitter timeline is to be believed) critics weren't even allowed to mention that Dr. Octavius was in Insomniac's Spider-Man even though he first shows up, like, within the first twenty minutes.
The fuss surrounding TLOU2's story isn't overblown, though. The game is legitimately full of shocks and turns, aided by a deliberately misleading marketing campaign that paints Joel as having a much different role in the game than he does. And while a great deal of the outcry has unfortunately been centered on the game's politics and diverse representation, I'm worried that the ideological debates will drown out the real reasons that this plot doesn't work.
The weekend prior to TLOU2's release, I replayed the original for the first time since its release. Not only do I still love it, but I was struck as much as ever by its maturity, particularly from the same studio responsible for the enjoyable but lightweight and silly Uncharted series. The game is remarkably light on flashy set pieces and witty one-liners, opting instead to portray a serious, intimate human drama -- something incredibly rare in the AAA space.
What's equally rare for this industry is that TLOU had a perfect ending, in which the player character makes the decision to essentially doom humanity to save the life of a single person. On a material level, it renders the whole journey meaningless, yet in a game that is entirely about the burgeoning relationship between two characters, this one action underlines just how far they've come.
And then the game exercises the restraint to just cut to credits almost immediately afterward and let us write the rest of the story in our minds from there. Could Joel face repercussions for what he did? Does he have regrets? Does Ellie believe his story? How would she react if she found out the truth? These are all interesting questions that Naughty Dog was wise to leave hanging, because they're all secondary to the progress Joel has made as a character. Agree with his actions or not, at least you understand why he made them.
For those reasons, I was apprehensive about the announcement of a sequel, and I'm sad to report that my fears were well-founded. Let's go through it, but be warned: SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.
Now, I don't actually have a problem with Joel dying. Many people seem to think it's done purely for shock value, which I disagree with. Although it's not immediately spelled out who Abby and her friends are or why they've come to Jackson to kill Joel (and only Joel; crucially, Ellie and Tommy are in the room as well but are spared), anyone's first assumption should be that it's payback for Joel's choice at the end of the first TLOU. Regardless of how you feel about Joel and whether or not he made the right call, there's no denying that his choice to potentially rob humanity of a cure to the zombie infection leaves him vulnerable to this sort of retaliation.
The more interesting question is whether Sony and Naughty Dog were being shady in their choice to mis-market TLOU2 as featuring Joel more prominently than it actually does, as there are scenes in the trailers that don't appear in the final game. I see both sides of the argument. On one hand, if fans pick up on the facts that (a) this is a revenge story and (b) Joel doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight, they may prematurely guess the twist. On the other hand, those who wanted Joel to have a greater presence have a sound argument in being misled. It's a fascinating debate, but one that's somewhat irrelevant to the quality of the game in and of itself.
Plenty of people also just... don't want Joel to die, and it kicks off the running theme that TLOU2 wants you to suffer, to feel the pain of the characters within its narrative. And hey, we're much more on Ellie's side in her quest for vengeance than if it had been Dina, a character we've just met.
So both Ellie and Tommy want revenge. Based on the patches that Abby's group were wearing, they believe that the perpetrators belong to the Washington Liberation Front (WLF) out of Seattle. Tommy heads off by himself, hoping to avoid putting Ellie in danger, but she naturally follows close behind, with Dina accompanying her. We smash cut to Seattle and the game properly begins.
As all of this is happening, various pieces are being set in the background. The WLF, or "Wolves," are engaged in a turf war with a religious cult called the Seraphites (or "Scars") who believe that pre-infection technology is sinful. We also catch snippets of conversations hinting that there's some sort of internal drama with the Wolves and that Abby isn't in great standing with her own people. Interspersed with the present-day stuff, we get a few flashbacks centered on the relationship between Joel and Ellie in the years between the two games, with the latter expressing remorse that her immunity couldn't be used to save people, and beginning to express doubt with Joel's story.
Ellie eventually beats a woman named Nora for information on Abby's whereabouts. In the process, Nora comes very close to revealing why they killed Joel, but Ellie isn't interested. Although we're initially meant to believe that she's simply single-mindedly focused on bringing Joel's killers to justice, a flashback soon drops the game's first major bombshell: that a couple of years prior, Ellie forced Joel to reveal the truth about what happened in Salt Lake City. We'd been operating on the assumption that Ellie had been unaware of Joel's choice and would uncover the grim truth at some point in her journey, when in actuality she's known about it the whole time and is determined to find Joel's killers anyway.
Complicating things further, Ellie's reaction when Joel reveals the truth is, understandably, one of horror and disgust. Although she stays in Jackson, she makes it clear that she wants nothing to do with Joel ever again. Which raises the question of why she embarked on this journey, though Naughty Dog leaves that thread hanging for a while.
On Nora's tip, Ellie travels to an aquarium where she encounters two more members of Abby's group, a couple named Owen and Mel, though things turn violent and both die before Ellie can extract any information from them. (Ellie realizes afterwards that Mel was pregnant, which horrifies her.) She then finally rendezvouses with Tommy, but having exhausted all leads, the four agree to pack up and head home.
As they're about to leave, though, Abby shows up at the theater, killing Jesse and badly wounding Tommy. She's clearly very cross with the group for killing all of her friends, particularly after she consciously spared Ellie and Tommy back in Jackson. And then TLOU2 drops its second major bombshell: that players control Abby for almost the entire second half of the campaign, as we rewind the clock and experience the events of the last three days from her perspective.
The bulk of the conversation seems to have centered on the fact that Abby is possibly trans. I say "possibly" because it's never blatantly spelled out. She goes by female pronouns but is unusually butch in appearance, and that's almost the extent of it. Later, however, she befriends a Scar boy named Lev who does explicitly identify as trans, and who's being persecuted by the cult for coming out. Abby protects Lev for the remainder of the game, even from fellow Wolves, and when Lev asserts that Abby is killing her own people, she counters, "You're my people."
So there's definitely a gender identity thing going on, and while it's not really the focus of the plot, it's enough to make the transphobic gamers among us uncomfortable, particularly when Abby and Owen have a sex scene midway through this portion of the story. And hey, I'm glad they're uncomfortable, and I hope they stay uncomfortable. But in case you're wondering why TLOU2 has been so widely labeled "SJW propaganda," there's your answer.
[Edit: The more I read about this, the less convinced I am that this interpretation of Abby is correct. But it's still worth bringing up because it's the conclusion that a lot of gaming's less desirable folks have been jumping to, and judging the game for.]
Anyway, Abby's motivation for killing Joel, it turns out, was exactly what I'd predicted in my mind. Not only was Abby a Firefly stationed in Salt Lake City when Joel massacred the group, but her father was the surgeon who was going to operate on Ellie. So both of our protagonists have set out to avenge the deaths of their fathers or father figures. These are what we call parallels, children.
In the present day, Owen has gone AWOL because he's exhausted by all of the violence. He hopes to repair an old sailboat he found out by the aquarium and chase a rumor that the Fireflies have regrouped in Santa Barbara. He and Abby used to date years ago, and even though he recently impregnated Mel, their feelings for each other prompt Abby to abandon her post. After rescuing Lev just as a major battle between the Wolves and Scars erupts, Abby returns to the aquarium only to find Owen and Mel lying cold and dead in a pool of blood, just as the group were about to set off for a better life.
Unfortunately, as much as I want to like Abby given all of the bigoted nonsense that's been slung her way, and simple truth is that whatever magic Naughty Dog cast to create two of gaming's most convincingly human characters in the first TLOU seems to have been drained when they got around to writing the sequel. Actress Laura Bailey does fine work in the role, but Abby is cold, stern and distant, even in scenes that are meant to be tender and lighthearted. While the plot had me intrigued just out of its sheer audacity to flip the tables like this, in practice, the back half of the Seattle portion bored me to tears because I didn't care about anyone involved.
Of course, during this stretch, I was assuming that Naughty Dog's endgame was to underline that the hero of one story is the villain of another, and vice versa. This is further reinforced when we finally catch up to the standoff in the theater and we, still in control of Abby, are forced into a boss fight against Ellie. This is the point when the story takes a particularly ugly turn, as whatever state of mind Naughty Dog wanted me to be in by the time I had to start beating the sweet, spunky girl from TLOU into a bloody pulp, I wasn't. At least I'm invested in Ellie's particular side of the story, even if I don't yet know how I'm supposed to feel about her motivations.
Abby wins and nearly kills Ellie. Dina intervenes, but Abby overcomes her as well and is about to slit her throat. Ellie exclaims that Dina is pregnant, to which Abby replies "good" and very nearly goes through with it, until Lev runs in and gets all weepy-eyed about it. Abby then decides on a whim to let it go, and warns Ellie that she never wants to see her again. Everyone leaves Seattle and the credits roll.
Just kidding. Though TLOU2 has already run the length of at least two games by this point, we still have an epilogue to get through, and this is where the plot goes completely off the rails.
Some time later, Ellie and Dina are living on a farm with the latter's baby. They get a visit from Tommy, who I swear to god I saw get shot in the head by Abby earlier, but I guess he survived that, as you do. Anyway, he shares a tip that Abby has possibly been spotted in Santa Barbara. Dina interjects that they've left that life behind, which is the smart answer, but Ellie still has PTSD about Joel's death and tries to sneak out in the middle of the night to hunt Abby. Dina catches her and promises that if Ellie leaves, their relationship is over. Ellie leaves anyway.
Anyway, Ellie arrives on the coast a few months later and nearly gets captured by a couple of Rattlers herself. The encounter leaves her with a grisly injury that serves no purpose in the story, and this was around the time that the game's violence started to come across as a bit depraved to me. She finds out that Abby is imprisoned at a nearby compound, and realizing that she's currently suffering a worse fate than Ellie could ever inflict on her, she finally lets it go and heads back to her comfortable life.
Just kidding. She infiltrates the compound with the apparent intention of... rescuing Abby? She liberates the camp's prisoners, who tell her that Abby attempted to escape not long ago, and that she's been taken to "the pillars," where she's likely already dead. The pillars are out on the beach, and they're where misbehaving prisoners get hung up to slowly die of exposure. She finds Abby there, who's barely clinging to life, and realizing that Abby is definitively about to die, she finally, at long last, gives up on this empty quest and returns home.
One more time: JUST KIDDING. She cuts Abby down, and Abby rescues Lev, who's also been tied up. The three then head to the water where they intend to escape on some boats that have been hitched up, but of course Ellie announces her intention to finally exact revenge.
And here's the part where TLOU2, in its final moments, fully lost me. Ellie throws her to the ground, but Abby exclaims that she refuses to fight back. That's not good enough for Ellie. She needs Abby to fight back, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. And to make her fight back, Ellie, who earlier panicked over unknowingly killing a pregnant woman, pulls out her knife and holds it to Lev's neck, threatening to kill him -- an innocent child -- if Abby doesn't consent to a mandatory final boss.
So a fistfight ensues between two characters who are inexplicably still able to throw punches despite one of them having been spiked in the abdomen and another having been hung out for god knows how long to die of hunger and thirst. Abby bites a couple of Ellie's fingers off, but Ellie gets the upper hand, pins Abby down in some shallow water, and begins to drown her.
And then she just... stops. Despite having given up everything and killed countless people to pursue a quest of vengeance that she's seconds away from fulfilling, she just stops. She releases Abby, who rides off with Lev, and that's it. After everything she's done, after all of the ways in which she's shed her humanity, she chose this moment to get the memo that Violence Is Bad, Actually.
And if, like me, you at least understand why Joel had a target on his back, well, what the hell was the point of all of this? To underline that revenge is a vicious cycle, that violence begets violence? We know that, Naughty Dog. We know that from the countless other forms of fiction that have made the same point.
But I'm not even convinced that that was the point, despite it being the most obvious read of the climactic scene. Because if the whole message is that it takes one side to break the cycle rather than perpetuate it, then the game would have ended when Abby did that in the theater, letting Ellie go a second time despite it clearly being in her best interest to end it right then and there. That decision muddled whatever point Naughty Dog was trying to make with this mess. Violence begets violence, but walking away also begets violence, apparently? So just do whatever you want and hope that it works out?
We get one more flashback about how Joel and Ellie kinda-sorta reconciled about the Salt Lake City incident the night before Joel was killed. She's upset that he took away her agency, her chance to make a difference. Although he's clearly remorseful about hurting her, he also firmly states that if given a second chance, he'd make the same decision. She responds that she can't forgive him for that, but would like to try, and the scene ends with a glimmer of hope that maybe their relationship can be salvaged.
Is it a big enough glimmer to justify Ellie's transformation into a cold-blooded murderer who would threaten to slit an innocent child's throat? I would most definitely argue that it isn't. But in isolation, it's a wonderfully subtle scene. In fact, the flashbacks between Joel and Ellie are TLOU2's one unqualified high point, because they build on what made the first game so good. These scenes have no misguided delusions to being profound. They simply depict an organic relationship between two of the most shockingly well-realized characters in interactive fiction.
Meanwhile, in the dour present, Ellie returns to the farmhouse to find it abandoned, Dina having made good on her promise to leave. She picks up Joel's guitar, the one reminder she has of the man whose death inspired this rampage, but is unable to play it because she's missing two of her fingers. She's lost everything in her pursuit of vengeance, chief among them the audience's affinity for her. She then sets off to an uncertain future, and I could not care less where she ends up.
There's been a lot of talk about the violence in TLOU2 and the way that the game tries to make players feel guilty for the deeds they're forced to carry out. Honestly, it's nothing I haven't seen in other titles. But I can dismiss the sleaziness of, say, the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy because I was never emotionally invested in Lara Croft to begin with.
But Naughty Dog is better than this. Neil Druckmann is better than this. I know, because in the original TLOU, they found beauty and humanity in unspeakable ugliness. TLOU2 does the inverse: it takes that beauty and drowns it in a bloated, prolonged cacophony of unearned misery. And try as I may to hold the first TLOU in the same high regard that I did a week ago, it's difficult to think back on the extraordinary character dynamic at the heart of that game without being reminded of the senseless queasiness that followed. And that's crueler than any lone act of simulated violence could ever be.
