The Last of Us 2 (Coming June 19th)

[Zetetic]

Actually, I might be able to play it on an emulator if there was a good reason to...

Edit: No, I'm easily fooled.

[popcorn]

I haven't finished it yet, which is why I don't feel even slightly guilty about saying that it's too long rather than writing a post about Palestine, but when I'm done I will write a lot of bollocks about it. Probably not about Palestine though, sorry.

[Bazooka]

Do you even supplement bro, do you even stealth bro?

[Zetetic]

Probably not about Palestine though, sorry.

That's fine. I don't think that's the only lens worth thinking about it with.

I do think it clearly wants to convey something about violence in the real world, and I'd like to read more about how people found that attempt.

[willy crossit]

I finished it earlier and it really is fantastic but in truth I don't think there's a whole lot more to take from it than

"vengeance isn't great"

Spoiler alert

It sets this up pretty solidly in the first eight hours and then proceeds to bang you over the head with it over and over for the rest of the game.

[close]

I don't think there really is much more to it than that. Doesn't mean that it's not a valid point, or it's not a great game, or that the story isn't compelling, just that I don't know how much more there is to take from it. Or maybe I need another playthrough.

[popcorn]

I cannot fucking believe how long this thing is. No wonder it killed everyone making it. They've made eight games.

For all the accessibility options it has, which is great, the one I think it's missing is some way of knowing how long you have left. I've felt like I'm at the end of the game for several hours now and I'm just going to have to call it quits and go to bed before my eyeballs burst into flame.

[bgmnts]

Sounds really fun.

[magval]

I felt I was at the end on Monday night, stayed up a little later to accommodate it, and realised before I finally quit that I was not near the end at all, and ended up playing from 8am til 10pm Tuesday before I got done with it.

I can tell you how much is left without locations or chapter names if you want?

[Thursday]

Never play a JRPG if you think this is too long then Popcorn.

[popcorn]

I felt I was at the end on Monday night, stayed up a little later to accommodate it, and realised before I finally quit that I was not near the end at all, and ended up playing from 8am til 10pm Tuesday before I got done with it.

I can tell you how much is left without locations or chapter names if you want?

Yes please. I'd like to know if I can finish it tonight or if it's going to take me another six hours.

Spoiler alert

I'm in Santa Barbara hunting Abby. It's all gone Pulp Fiction. Ellie got strung upside down but escaped.

[close]

[popcorn]

Never play a JRPG if you think this is too long then Popcorn.

That's actually one of the reasons Panzer Dragoon Saga is the only JRPG I've ever truly loved - it's like 15 hours long. Lovely.

[willy crossit]

Yes please. I'd like to know if I can finish it tonight or if it's going to take me another six hours.

Spoiler alert

I'm in Santa Barbara hunting Abby. It's all gone Pulp Fiction. Ellie got strung upside down but escaped.

[close]

1-2 hours left

[Timothy]

Yes please. I'd like to know if I can finish it tonight or if it's going to take me another six hours.

Spoiler alert

I'm in Santa Barbara hunting Abby. It's all gone Pulp Fiction. Ellie got strung upside down but escaped.

[close]

Nearly at the end now. Max two hours left.

[popcorn]

Thanks! I'll get it done tonight.

[Bazooka]

Popcorn you would have finished the game by now if you didn't keep restarting so you could keep seeing

Spoiler alert

Abby getting a good rodgering on the boat

[close]

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

It sounds like you're all gritting your teeth and trying to convince yourselves you're enjoying it.

[popcorn]

It sounds like you're all gritting your teeth and trying to convince yourselves you're enjoying it.

This is definitely not the case - every time I'm not playing it, I'm desperate to go back to it. It's brilliantly engrossing, but also incredibly fatiguing. I'll write more about that once the credits are rolling.

[Zetetic]

Noah Caldwell-Gervais has done a 2h12m video[nb]1h45m at 1.25x, and you really can just listen to his stuff I find.[/nb]:
How Does The Last of Us Part 2 Compare to the Last of Us Remastered?

(He tends to be very open, thoughtful and positive character, capable of finding value in stuff that I've struggled to.)

[Harpo Speaks]

When you say that the

Spoiler alert

shift in perspective

[close]

"works" ("to a certain extent"), what do you think it achieves?

Spoiler alert

Only in so much as that it does allow you to eventually empathise to a degree with that character, a feeling which is completely at odds to your initial reaction to Abby, and which helps facilitate the theme of cycles of violence, and the ending thereof.

Now, I personally think it's questionable as to whether in order to engender this feeling in the player, that we need to spend a sustained (or indeed any) period of time playing as said character. I think there are other ways to convey that, and ones that I would have preferred, but nevertheless I can only take the game as it is.

The game is trying to place the player in a particular extreme state, and then attempting to move you away from that. So when you are Ellie, and you watch as a character that she (and the player on a meta level) is emotionally attached to, is brutally tortured and murdered in front of us, you're supposed to feel her anger and desire for retribution and justice. That the act is unforgivable. By the end of the game however that particular bloodlust had completely dissipated.

It's correct that there's nothing revelatory about that idea of violence begats violence, and there's a need to break those cycles. But I think it's something that's rarely looked at in games. And certainly not presented in the way it was here. I should stress that I don't the above makes it a masterpiece, or even a great game, just trying to expand upon your question above. I certainly think there's a better version of this story to be told.

I personally wouldn't have minded even if this was a more straight-forward cathartic revenge story, so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that as a framework. But I'd want it to be elevated by the delivery, just in the same way the first one elevated itself beyond the various zombie/post-apocalyptic tropes it employed.

[close]

[Zetetic]

Thanks Harpo Speaks. I'm grateful for the thoughts.

[brat-sampson]

The atmosphere around some of these locations/set-pieces is some of the best I've ever seen. They sure as fuck know how to build a mood.

[Chedney Honks]

The ecstasy of violence. 😜😜😜

Caving a guy's head in with a pipe until it's Winalot. 😉😉😉

Upgraded rifle moving half of someone's face down the road. 😄😄😄

Shotgun some cunt's legs off and listen to him scream himself to death. 😢😢😢

Hit a dog in the ribs with a wrench so hard its lungs burst. 😁😁😁

Scythe through a cunt's kneecap with an arrow and while he's doubled over screaming, put a knife in his eye. 😢😢😢

Set up a trap mine in a doorway and rifle some guy's best pal in the heart right in front of him. Lure him to the threshold by pretending to run away. Bang. 🙂🙂🙂

Sprint at a guy just trying to protect his people and throw a molotov cocktail at his chest. 😍😍😍

[brat-sampson]

I heard a youtuber use the phrase 'murder playground' and a few of these set-pieces really are that. Loads of routs to take and ways through and around rooms, buildings etc, seemingly dozens of guards or dogs. Maybe on Harder modes where ammo and parts are harder to come by and (not sure but maybe?) the AI gets harder to ditch once they've got you, maybe then it all gets a lot more stressful, but I'm finding on normal that you can generally just have fun with it. For all the grimness of the plot and the brutally graphic nature of the kills, they just can't make trap-mines and 

Spoiler alert

explosive

[close]

arrows not fun to play around with.

[popcorn]

Finished.

Nothing Sonic Adventure 2 didn't do first.

[Bazooka]

Finished.

Nothing Sonic Adventure 2 didn't do first.

So you found the Chao garden?

[AsparagusTrevor]

Finished.

Nothing Sonic Adventure 2 didn't do first.

Me too. I'm now very depressed.

[popcorn]

I could write a book about what I think about this game. The short version is that I think it's pretty good, excellent in many areas, but suffers from a weak structure and some weak characters. Here are some initial thoughts on the violence and themes.

Spoiler alert

It's obvious to anyone who plays the game, because it's not exactly subtle, but here's Druckmann explicitly saying what they were hoping to achieve:

"Shame and guilt. Those are things that are uniquely videogame-y, right? It's like, I just committed those acts. I am complicit in those acts. And now I get to see the consequences of those acts by empathising with these other people."

I think this is a noble experiment, but my basic reaction to it was alan-partridge-shrugging.gif.

I've never felt, particularly, that I am "in" a game, at least no moreso than I feel I am "in" a film or book when I'm absorbed in it. I never feel I *am* Ellie or Joel, and I never feel like their decisions are my decisions. I'm just following a script. As far as narrative goes, I tend to just see games as mechanisms for delivering traditional things like character and plot, without much further implication, which is fine by me.

Druckmann says:

"The whole thing was constructed in such a way as to say, in the beginning of the game, we're going to make you feel such intense hate that you can't wait to find these people and make them pay."

I didn't feel this way. I thought: OK so Ellie is now enraged and has a clear goal, which is cool, that's the beginning of an interesting plot. And there's a sort of mystery here about who Abby is and why she killed Joel, so I want to keep playing and see what happens next. Great!

But I didn't personally hate Abby or want her dead. She's not real. Ellie wants her dead, but I'm not Ellie and Ellie's not real either. Likewise, when Ellie smashed up Nora, with me pressing the square button, I felt no complicity. I'm just turning the page.

The prerelease discourse made me expect some Kojima-style shaming mechanisms - you know, ludicrous gameplay interventions that would make us feel ashamed of our words and deeds. Remember how MGS3 forces you to wade through river alongside the ghosts of all the soldiers you've killed? Ridiculous, but at least that was playful and inventive in that special Kojima way.

All this talk of soldiers having names and flashbacks about dogs you've murdered made me wonder if Last of Us 2 would try something similar, like every time you killed a dog you'd get a flashback with it as a puppy or something. That really would have been embarrassing, on a David Cage scale. Instead what we get is just basic. Mercifully, really. So Ellie kills a dog, and then hours later you play a boring minigame of fetch with that same dog in a flashback. Who cares? This is fairly primitive storytelling stuff. It's neither capitalises on the video game medium nor goes so grotesquely OTT that it becomes embarrassing. It's just a bit dull. That's it.

All this makes me genuinely surprised the game has been as hated as it is by the usual suspects. Those guys on YouTube apparently really did all hate Abby with the kind of searing rage Druckmann intended, and so are incredulous that Ellie chose not to kill her. I suppose that creates the REAL gameplay/story dissonance, because they get to be Ellie the murderous badass in gameplay but Ellie decides not to be that person any more in the final 5 minutes of the game. They don't get to press square and drown Abby after all.

The gameplay is violent and scary and engaging. I don't know if that makes the player or the game or the protagonists or the developers hypocrites. Actually I think I do know, and the answer is that it kind of basically does. Oh well.

I do think that Ellie's arc is great. Her decisions make sense. I loved her transformation and I loved the ending. I bought it. She realises that what she's really pissed off about is that she'll never get the chance to forgive Joel. That's why we see the flashback about her promising to try to forgive him. That's what Abby took from her. And killing Abby wouldn't settle that.

Bored of typing/thinking now. Might type/think more later. Sorry none of this was very sophisticated. Feeling lazy.

[close]

[Zetetic]

I think you're right that the hate is testament to how much some people were engaged emotionally with the story. Perhaps to the detriment of other kinds of engagement.

On "complicity" - I sometimes wonder if the more significant thing is not complicity with the decisions of the player character (certainly in games where you are just "following a script", Flicksync-like games as Noah suggests) but complicity with the author. With something like this, you're spending something like 3-5 working days acting out their view of the world.

[popcorn]

I think you're right that the hate is testament to how much some people were engaged emotionally with the story.

I keep seeing comments like this:

Spoiler alert

"Imagine this logic in the Ending of GOW3:
Kratos: I suddenly don't want to kill you anymore Zeus"

[substitute GOW3 with Avengers example to preference]

... As if characters simply have goals and that's all, and then they achieve the goal and the story ends and that makes sense. I don't know if it's actually product of their high level of emotional engagement with the stories and characters, or because they just don't really understand what stories are.

[close]

On "complicity" - I sometimes wonder if the more significant thing is not complicity with the decisions of the player character (certainly in games where you are just "following a script", Flicksync-like games as Noah suggests) but complicity with the author. With something like this, you're spending something like 3-5 working days acting out their view of the world.

Dunno what to make of that really. You could say the same thing about reading all the Stephen King novels.

[Barry Admin]

The ecstasy of violence. 😜😜😜

Caving a guy's head in with a pipe until it's Winalot. 😉😉😉

Upgraded rifle moving half of someone's face down the road. 😄😄😄

Shotgun some cunt's legs off and listen to him scream himself to death. 😢😢😢

Hit a dog in the ribs with a wrench so hard its lungs burst. 😁😁😁

Scythe through a cunt's kneecap with an arrow and while he's doubled over screaming, put a knife in his eye. 😢😢😢

Set up a trap mine in a doorway and rifle some guy's best pal in the heart right in front of him. Lure him to the threshold by pretending to run away. Bang. 🙂🙂🙂

Sprint at a guy just trying to protect his people and throw a molotov cocktail at his chest. 😍😍😍

I checked your post history yesterday to see if you were okay after the Rona test. I saw this post and I'm none the fucking wiser tbh.