The Last of Us Part II

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Congrats on dunking on your Ellie should be scared of Joel thing again. That same logic of context applies to how Ellie sees Joel.

Well done. I'm greatly enjoying how Everytime you try to make Abby look good, it makes Joel look better.

Sign I’ve already explain this. I, ME, Daemos daemonium, does not think ellie should be scared of Joel. I DO NOT take the game play literally. I DON’T THINK any one should. I am applying SOME ONE ELSES views of the game to both but that doesn’t not mean that I, ME, Daemos daemonium hold said views.

I’m both cases joel and Abbie are bad People in both cases with out a full picture lev and ellie think them heros and in both cases if every thing you could do in the game play as applies they should GTFO.

[Tech614]

You mean the most hyped triple A game of the year sold well?

There is selling well, and then there is selling faster then any other game from the same publisher. Nice try.

[NineSpine]

Yeah, a guard talking shit and threatening someone trespassing who is a threat to them and their group. Such a crime.



I'm not sure why, but you just hold these games and characters to incredibly different standards. You make any excuse and find any justification you can for Joel's actions, including ignoring what one *can* do in the gameplay, while holding Ellie to much higher standards and taking the very worst you *can* do in gameplay as canon, and accepting no justifications or rationalizations for her. When the same justifications and rationalizations you make for Joel apply to her.

You seem to think the argument here is "Joel is morally righteous". Nobody said that.

Joel isn't a good person. Nobody is arguing he is. But the actions he takes are all part of self-preservation (not self-defense). They are in accordance with the world he is living in. He is not a good person, but he reflects the world he lives in and his story is about finding his humanity that he has clearly lost. The fact that he does questionable moral things makes sense. It works as a part of the story. It's in line with the character. You are supposed to identify with him insofar as you know what happened to him in the beginning of the game and the brutality of the world he lives in.

Ellie, on the other hand, leaves a safe, loving place to go on a murder hobo rampage... TWICE. She only expresses trepidation when killing her TARGETS rather than the people that are in the way of her targets. To put this in context, it would be like if you decided to murder someone and did so and felt bad about it but were unaffected by the 75 people you murdered in the way there. Her character is a muddy, unclear mess. Her actions don't make sense unless you accept that she is an absolutely inhuman sociopathic monster. This makes her impossible to identify with and care for.

Ultimately, it looks to me like Naughty Dog made her worse in order to create a dichotomy with Abbie. When you violate the integrity of the characters to push thematic concepts, you are being pretentious and lazy. This is poor storytelling. And this is all putting aside the fact that the story, and game in general, is a completely bloated mess with terrible pacing, endless repetitive encounters, way too many inconsequential characters that we focus tons of time on, and on and on. This is not a good game. There's a 10/10 game that is 12 hours long in there somewhere, but this is a clear as day case of people getting big heads by being told what geniuses they are, and either surrounding themselves with yes men or having editors that were afraid to say "no".

It's a damn shame, because Naughty Dog's old mantra was "simple stories, complex characters" and in this game they completely inverted it. We got a complex story and simple characters, which is the worst kind of storytelling.

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There is selling well, and then there is selling faster then any other game from the same publisher. Nice try.

Who thought this game wasn't going to sell well? This is a really bizarre flex.

[PaladinSum]

Sign I’ve already explain this. I, ME, Daemos daemonium, does not think ellie should be scared of Joel. I DO NOT take the game play literally. I DON’T THINK any one should. I am applying SOME ONE ELSES views of the game to both but that doesn’t not mean that I, ME, Daemos daemonium hold said views.

I’m both cases joel and Abbie are bad People in both cases with out a full picture lev and ellie think them heros and in both cases if every thing you could do in the game play as applies they should GTFO.

Still giving the tip to Joel. He hasn't killed kids.

So, which way would you like it? Ellie is a failure for not killing the monster who killed her dad since Abby did and Abby sad? Or Abby is a hypocritical idiot for killing a father while whining about her dad?

[NineSpine]

No I’m assuming omnipotence on the part of the player who knows they don’t need to clear a area to move on but does it any way because they want to. The same goes for ellie in this game.

And yes seeking revenge is different which is why the game goes out of its way to show the mental toll story kills have on ellie.

Running and killing every one in game play though is exactly the same as neither game take it into account in terms of story as both games would fall apart if they did.

I saw no mental toll on Ellie. Within a couple of hours she becomes a bizarre, irrational, selfish sociopathic monster. That's not a toll. That's just "What if we made Ellie a sociopath?" I saw no descent. No transformation. It was just "And now Ellie is this".

This notion that we should consider the knowledge of the player as a part of the story is next-level insanity. Should the characters also all act as though they are aware they are in a video game?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Still giving the tip to Joel. He hasn't killed kids.

So, which way would you like it? Ellie is a failure for not killing the monster who killed her dad since Abby did and Abby sad? Or Abby is a hypocritical idiot for killing a father while whining about her dad?

Abbies a hypocrite but She likely doesn’t care at all or is obvious to it.

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I saw no mental toll on Ellie. Within a couple of hours she becomes a bizarre, irrational, selfish sociopathic monster. That's not a toll. That's just "What if we made Ellie a sociopath?" I saw no descent. No transformation. It was just "And now Ellie is this".

This notion that we should consider the knowledge of the player as a part of the story is next-level insanity. Should the characters also all act as though they are aware they are in a video game?

If you didn’t notice any toll then you just weren't paying attention that’s all there is to it.

And no you shouldn’t consider it as part of the story you also should’t consider actions you do during gameplay that are treated as they never happened as part of the story.

[Tech614]

Who thought this game wasn't going to sell well? This is a really bizarre flex.

So feel free to quote yourself claiming it would be the fastest selling sony game ever. Once again there is a big ass difference in selling well, and selling faster then the company has ever sold games before. Horizon sold well and yet it was no where near the same pace. TLOU1 sold well, again no where near the same pace. Which is saying something about those sales. The closest game to selling this well for Sony was Spider-Man which is one of the most popular IPs in the world and yet it was 700k off.

Also we have people on this actual page like Elim Garak who claimed the game was going to be a critical and commercial flop who changes his argument every 5 seconds after being wrong and probably wonders why I stopped replying to him a month ago(cause of a nifty feature called ignore).

[Kolvarg]

Her actions don't make sense unless you accept that she is an absolutely inhuman sociopathic monster. This makes her impossible to identify with and care for.

It's a damn shame, because Naughty Dog's old mantra was "simple stories, complex characters" and in this game they completely inverted it. We got a complex story and simple characters, which is the worst kind of storytelling.

Please, feel free to link me to footage of Ellie killing those dozens and hundreds of people you claim she did in the actual narrative (not gameplay).

Again, either you are taking into consideration gameplay or not. If you are, then Joel killed hundreds of people in the first game that he absolutely didn't need to, and it being purely for self-preservation is a fantasy.

How exactly are Ellie and Joel more complex in the first game than in the second? Maybe some of the side characters are, but yea that's also because this game focus on a much bigger number of characters than the first.

Of course it was going to sell well. None of us knew how bad it was going to be before purchasing it, but maybe you haven't seen the player reviews, which are scathing.

Mentioning the user ratings to defend the game is bad is just as relevant as mentioning the flawless critic reviews to defend the game is good. And by the way, user ratings on websites which weren't bombed actually have reasonable averages, far from scathing.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6298000/ - 7.2/10
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/...ELASTOFUSPART2 - 4/5

[PaladinSum]

Abbies a hypocrite but She likely doesn’t care at all or is obvious to it.

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If you didn’t notice any toll then you just weren't paying attention that’s all there is to it.

And no you shouldn’t consider it as part of the story you also should’t consider actions you do during gameplay that are treated as they never happened as part of the story.

More fodder for the "It's no surprise Abby is hated" pile.

And how about they just make a movie since they can't handle a narrative about the brutality of the apocalypse without undermining it by giving you a flame thrower.

[Sluvs]

TLOU 2 will probably be the game that people look back and say: Oh! Is this the game that the internet hated? I thought it was pretty good.

I feel like the only reason it got bad scores from users it's because of the leaks. When you read the plot points without any context or story tying them together, ofc it does not look good, you are literally not experiencing the game and judging it's story already.

[Tech614]

Please, feel free to link me to footage of Ellie killing those dozens and hundreds of people in the actual narrative.

Again, either you are taking into consideration gameplay or not. If you are, then Joel killed hundreds of people in the first game that he absolutely didn't need to, and it being purely for self-preservation is a fantasy.

How exactly are Ellie and Joel more complex in the first game than in the second? Maybe some of the side characters are, but yea that's also because this game focus on a much bigger number of characters than the first.



Mentioning the user ratings to defend the game is bad is just as relevant as mentioning the flawless critic reviews to defend the game is good. And by the way, user ratings on websites which weren't bombed actually have reasonable averages, far from scathing.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6298000/ - 7.2/10
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/...ELASTOFUSPART2 - 4/5

You have to own the game to review it on PS Store and lets be honest, these kids already have their mom's CC maxed out from buying V bucks so they can't afford the $60 to bomb it.

[NineSpine]

Abbies a hypocrite but She likely doesn’t care at all or is obvious to it.

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If you didn’t notice any toll then you just weren't paying attention that’s all there is to it.

And no you shouldn’t consider it as part of the story you also should’t consider actions you do during gameplay that are treated as they never happened as part of the story.

Let me be clear: The first couple of hours of the game were incredible. I admired the bold decision to kill Joel. I'm not sure that was the right direction for STARTING the game, but it was bold and I respect it. The direction the game was clearly going was that Ellie's quest for revenge would conflict with her desire to be with Dina and that would be the central conflict. And then, after maybe 8 hours of exploring that..... it suddenly wasn't the point anymore. Dina was completely sidelined, the game was made about other things, and then I was ripped out of the game to switch to a different character who I didn't care about and whose shallow one dimensional friends I didn't care about.

The fundamental problem is that the central thing that was going to make the game interesting didn't exist for the bulk of the game. Dina was MIA for half of Ellie's story, and then obviously was a non-presence for Abbie's story. This is what bad, pretentious storytelling looks like. When the game switched to Abbie I could see a bunch of people sitting around a conference room table patting each other on the back for how clever they were to subvert fan expectations. It was lame. The part of the game that was interesting was Ellie and the effect her quest for vengeance would have on her relationships with her friends... but that wasn't really explored at all until the very end. It wasn't a story that we got to watch evolve. It's a story that started, got interrupted by 20 hours of nonsense, and then picked back up with all the drama I wanted to see unfold set aside.

What's Ellie's actual narrative arc here? She sees Joel get killed, goes out for vengeance, becomes an inhuman sociopathic monster, and then stays that way for the rest of the game until the final moments maybe? There wasn't enough momentum to that story. It's a couple of switches flipping, no evolution, no dynamics.

[PaladinSum]

TLOU 2 will probably be the game that people look back and say: Oh! Is this the game that the internet hated? I thought it was pretty good.

I feel like the only reason it got bad scores from users it's because of the leaks. When you read the plot points without any context or story tying them together, ofc it does not look good, you are literally not experiencing the game and judging it's story already.

Hello 800th person who thinks people can't watch a game that lives and dies on it's story. I'm tired of this garbage bag defense against criticism.

[Elim Garak]

Also we have people on this actual page like Elim Garak who claimed the game was going to be a critical and commercial flop who changes his argument every 5 seconds after being wrong and probably wonders why I stopped replying to him a month ago(cause of a nifty feature called ignore).

Let's come together...right now... oh yeah... in sweet harmony... you fucking liar.

Oh, people who haven't seen the leaks (majority) will buy it, no doubt. It will not bomb financially. But it will bomb in ratings. We as players do not really care about the finance stuff. It's just business.

[NineSpine]

So feel free to quote yourself claiming it would be the fastest selling sony game ever. Once again there is a big ass difference in selling well, and selling faster then the company has ever sold games before. Horizon sold well and yet it was no where near the same pace. TLOU1 sold well, again no where near the same pace. Which is saying something about those sales. The closest game to selling this well for Sony was Spider-Man which is one of the most popular IPs in the world and yet it was 700k off.

Also we have people on this actual page like Elim Garak who claimed the game was going to be a critical and commercial flop who changes his argument every 5 seconds after being wrong and probably wonders why I stopped replying to him a month ago(cause of a nifty feature called ignore).

Cool? Who cares? This is the weirdest god damn flex I have ever seen.

Nobody:
You: TLOU2 IS SELLING REALLY WELL

[Lorgar Aurelian]

More fodder for the "It's no surprise Abby is hated" pile.

And how about they just make a movie since they can't handle a narrative about the brutality of the apocalypse without undermining it by giving you a flame thrower.

Movies don’t have gameplay collectables or Player interactions with the environment. If you wanted any of those things a game is the only way to go.

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TLOU 2 will probably be the game that people look back and say: Oh! Is this the game that the internet hated? I thought it was pretty good.

I feel like the only reason it got bad scores from users it's because of the leaks. When you read the plot points without any context or story tying them together, ofc it does not look good, you are literally not experiencing the game and judging it's story already.

The leaks really were a shame if it didn’t happen the flip would have likely taken every one by storm instead of just being something people complained about for weeks before any actual info was out.

[Tech614]

Cool? Who cares? This is the weirdest god damn flex I have ever seen.

Nobody:
You: TLOU2 IS SELLING REALLY WELL

Not only is TLOU2 selling really well, the salt pouring out of the haters screaching to "VOTE WITH UR WALLET" or "GET WOKE GO BROKE" before release might out number the dollar bills pouring into ND HQ.

[NineSpine]

Please, feel free to link me to footage of Ellie killing those dozens and hundreds of people you claim she did in the actual narrative (not gameplay).

Again, either you are taking into consideration gameplay or not. If you are, then Joel killed hundreds of people in the first game that he absolutely didn't need to, and it being purely for self-preservation is a fantasy.

How exactly are Ellie and Joel more complex in the first game than in the second? Maybe some of the side characters are, but yea that's also because this game focus on a much bigger number of characters than the first.

It's a pretty scathing indictment of the game when you have to defend the shallow characters by saying there are a lot of characters. That's not a good excuse. In fact, that's a great sign of bad storytelling.

I don't think you quite understand what "self-preservation" is and how it differs from "self-defense" and I'm not here to teach you like a fifth grader who is willfully misinterpreting things to avoid the point.

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Not only is TLOU2 selling really well, the salt pouring out of the haters screaching to "VOTE WITH UR WALLET" or "GET WOKE GO BROKE" before release might out number the dollar bills pouring into ND HQ.

I don't care about the sales, and I don't care about the people whose feelings get hurt by queer characters existing.

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Movies don’t have gameplay collectables or Player interactions with the environment. If you wanted any of those things a game is the only way to go.

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The leaks really were a shame if it didn’t happen the flip would have likely taken every one by storm instead of just being something people complained about for weeks before any actual info was out.

I went in cold and the flip felt incredibly lame and contrived to me.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Let me be clear: The first couple of hours of the game were incredible. I admired the bold decision to kill Joel. I'm not sure that was the right direction for STARTING the game, but it was bold and I respect it. The direction the game was clearly going was that Ellie's quest for revenge would conflict with her desire to be with Dina and that would be the central conflict. And then, after maybe 8 hours of exploring that..... it suddenly wasn't the point anymore. Dina was completely sidelined, the game was made about other things, and then I was ripped out of the game to switch to a different character who I didn't care about and whose shallow one dimensional friends I didn't care about.

The fundamental problem is that the central thing that was going to make the game interesting didn't exist for the bulk of the game. Dina was MIA for half of Ellie's story, and then obviously was a non-presence for Abbie's story. This is what bad, pretentious storytelling looks like. When the game switched to Abbie I could see a bunch of people sitting around a conference room table patting each other on the back for how clever they were to subvert fan expectations. It was lame. The part of the game that was interesting was Ellie and the effect her quest for vengeance would have on her relationships with her friends... but that wasn't really explored at all until the very end. It wasn't a story that we got to watch evolve. It's a story that started, got interrupted by 20 hours of nonsense, and then picked back up with all the drama I wanted to see unfold set aside.

What's Ellie's actual narrative arc here? She sees Joel get killed, goes out for vengeance, becomes an inhuman sociopathic monster, and then stays that way for the rest of the game until the final moments maybe? There wasn't enough momentum to that story. It's a couple of switches flipping, no evolution, no dynamics.

Nothing I can really add other then repeating that if you didn’t see the toll or the evolution that the events had on ellie then you weren't paying attention.

Actually that’s not true I could go over it again And break it all down like I’ve done on past pages but in this case I just don’t want to.

[NineSpine]

Nothing I can really add other then repeating that if you didn’t see the toll or the evolution that the events had on ellie then you weren't paying attention.

Actually there not true I could go over it again And break it all down like I’ve done on past pages but in this case I just don’t want to.

That's because there is no evolution. Ellie is exactly the same person from about hour 5 to hour 30.