Who played the first game (wrongly) as a sort of power fantasy. Neil druckman has said Joel was a bad person and not a hero.
Imo he got what he deserved.
I also think last of us 2 is a great (albeit brutal) game
Wow I had no idea. I still think it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played, but that definitely changes how some of the scenes come across.
Neil druckman has said Joel was a bad person and not a hero.
He’s the protagonist and the prime mover of the story. You can credibly describe him as an anti-hero. But when you set him up as the avatar of the player, you’re inviting sympathy. That’s before you get to the point where his primary motivators are grief and love.
Imo he got what he deserved.
There’s a (heavily doomer-slanted) view that everyone in The Last Of Us gets what they deserve. But this comes from the portrayal of the various characters as desperate, short-sighted, and inherently flawed beings. That ads a great deal of artistry to the setting. The fungus-zombies become more of an environmental hazard than antagonists, while the humans continue to plot their own futures in increasingly dire circumstances.
I also think last of us 2 is a great (albeit brutal) game
LoU1 ends with a certain sense of hopefulness. Survival in the face of tragedy and desperation.
I think LoU2 might have been a better game if it changed genres. Move away from the 3rd person survival-puzzle-horror and into civilization building, where you collect survivors and build up your neighborhood in the style of a Co-op Fortnite or Arma game. Maybe even flirt with a 4X style, where you get a certain number of days between major events that you can use to explore, hunt/gather, tech up/diplomacize, and finally try to wipe out the zombie menace with your coalition of family, friends, and allies.
Instead, it feels like the game fell into the Walking Dead trap, where they just kinda repeated the same themes and tropes from the original with a different suite of secondary characters.
Hopefulness? At the end of last of us 1? Last Of Us 1 has maybe the most artfully executed heartbreaking ending on earth, like the direction of that final scene makes me tear up every time. Where is the hope?
Absolutely you’re meant to be sympathetic to joel or at least feel pity for him which is why the ending works, if anything he’s not anti-hero, he’s a failed hero. His inability to treat Ellie as an actual person with agency leads him to tragedy, that’s what the last scene is cementing. That one conversation destroys the relationship they’ve built over the entire story. His willingness to double down on a lie they both know isn’t true.
LOU2 has it’s problems sure but fuck that’s an awful pitch. Fine for another ip or a totally out of left field spin off or something but talk about surgically extracting all of the shit that makes the first game good.
Where is the hope?
Joel’s decision not to sacrifice his surrogate daughter to a room full of hack surgeons signals a desire to protect the young at the expense of the old. It is the personification of the Old World Dying and the New World Struggling To Be Born.
His inability to treat Ellie as an actual person with agency leads him to tragedy, that’s what the last scene is cementing. That one conversation destroys the relationship they’ve built over the entire story. His willingness to double down on a lie they both know isn’t true.
I think you can see it as Joel stripping Elle of her agency. But I can also see it as Joel liberating Elle from a duty foisted on her by her elders. She’s raised to believe that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for the greater good and Joel is tasked with leading her to the slaughter house.
LOU2 has it’s problems sure but fuck that’s an awful pitch.
LOU1 can get away with being a tragedy that subverts the narrative of traditional survival horror games. But LOU2 just repeating “humans are fallible” line never gets us to a story about how societies form or these strong social ties build thriving communities. At some point, you need to get to the other side of tragedy or its just Shepard Tone: The Video Game.
I don’t think so. I think something like doom is a power fantasy, the last of us is something different.
This lined up well lol
The first game is one of my all-time favorite games, absolutely love it, so it’s interesting that I never had the slightest interest in the second. I very much doubt I’ll ever play it. For me, the ending of the first game is devastating, and is the end of Joel and Ellie’s story. We don’t need more. We know their lives will continue past the credits, we know the world the characters inhabit will go on, there’s more plot that could unfold, but it doesn’t need to. We know who these characters are now, we know the rules of their world, and whatever comes next is not going to reveal anything new about Joel and Ellie. We’ve been given enough that we can fill in the rest of their stories in our minds.
Which is why I didn’t need a sequel with these characters. Or any sequel at all really, because as well-drawn as the setting may be, it’s just another zombie apocalypse. The story of Ellie and Joel is why it’s worth my time to trudge back out into the thousandth video game zombie apocalypse, so a sequel with the same setting and new characters was going to need to be spectacular. From everything I’ve heard, it sounds like a game that’s jaw-dropping on a technical level, but is decidedly inferior to the first. I don’t feel any fomo by skipping it. In my mind, it doesn’t exist.
I just think the last of us 2 has a bad and confused story that doesn’t execute its themes very well, which is not something I’d necessarily say about the first one
