So I just finished the game and overall: I like the story quite a lot. I'll not go over everything but I'll address some of my thoughts on issues people seem to be having with the game:
"The vengeance angle doesn't work"
For me, the vengeance angle did work. I understand people seem to be wanting the characters to act pragmatically or rationally but grief isn't rational and I think that Naughty Dog's use of motion capture goes a remarkably long way to illustrating the moments when characters lose themselves over to that grief. I've seen people become totally overwhelmed when losing people they love in real life and it's not hard for me to imagine seemingly good people becoming consumed by vengeance in the way these characters do in a world as heightened by brutality as The Last of Us.
On the flip side, I also have no problem with the conceit of a 'revenge-drama' as a genre, so some people just might not dig it on a fundamental level.
"The event that kickstarts the whole game doesn't work"
A number of people have already expressed it here but Joel was never a good guy and I don't think losing him was a particularly unjust element of either the world or the story nor did I think it was a detriment to the game. I was genuinely surprised by his death and I was sold on the way the grief affected Ellie from the beginning. Then as every flashback introduced another facet of their relationship, I believed in her grief more.
"That thing that happens in the middle of the game doesn't work"
I was right there with you when I started playing as Abby, but maybe not for the reasons a lot of people didn't like it. I have no problem playing as characters in a game with opposing goals so I actually found the idea of playing as the 'antagonist' quite refreshing. My main issue was that it felt like when we returned to Seattle Day 1 and we had to start a whole new set of skill trees and find a whole new host of weapons, it felt like some momentum was lost. I wondered if the game was originally two separate campaigns that were smashed together at some point and I started daydreaming about what the game would look like if the Ellie and Abby campaigns alternated with each mission rather than in two large blocks. I still think there might be a case for examining the game like that to see if it would be less jarring.
Overall, though, before long I found myself enjoying the Abby campaign far more than I'd enjoyed the Ellie campaign. The story felt like there was a real sense of escalation that I think was helped by knowing the fates of certain characters. And generally speaking, it felt like the scope grew larger than the fairly rote revenge story that Ellie's game had followed up to that point. In the end I think it's fair to say that although the introduction of the Abby campaign felt...clumsy, to say the least, in the end I saw her and most of the WLF as real characters rather than boogeymen and it did a pretty good job of eliciting some emotions I would best describe as 'adjacent to guilt'. I don't necessarily think I actually felt guilty but it left a suitably sour taste in my mouth when I realised that these people weren't evil incarnate.
"What's all this SJW crap doing in my game?"
Yeah, I dug all that SJW crap. I'm a cis-straight-white-working class-twenty something but I've got family across the LGBT spectrum and seeing characters represented with LGBT traits but not defined by them was super cool and I'd be down to see more of it.
For those who feel uncomfortable seeing violence against LGBT people, I can entirely understand an aversion to this game but it's a world where everybody is violent to everybody and that would still be the case if every character was a cis-straight-white-working class-twenty something.
"So you think everything worked?"
Nope! Overall the broad picture worked pretty well for me and I'm willing to overlook a lot of tiny plot-hole-picking that some people are doing because I'm capable of suspending my disbelief when experiencing a work of fiction. But a few things felt rough to me:
- The aforementioned shift to the Abby campaign, as effective as it was eventually, felt very clumsy.
- Isaac felt utterly wasted. In a tighter script, he and the WLF would have taken the place of the Rattlers in the games final hours but instead he was killed off in a particularly hurried fashion. Wasting Jeffrey Wright like that should automatically land you in casting jail.
- The Seraphites skirt the line of 'cultist video game boogeymen' far too closely for my liking.
- What the fuck was with that reject Resident Evil boss that Abby fought in the hospital?
- I do not care for Dinah. I think the performance is fine but she comes across as a weirdly nothing character that feels very tropeish.
- The parallel pregnancies felt forced. I thought there was going to be something more with Mel's pregnancy but it seems like it's mostly there to make Ellie vomit. Probably should have had more impact on Owen in...I don't know, some way. Any way whatsoever.
- Stalkers can fuck off forever.
So, that's my initial take, half an hour after finishing.
Curious to see what others who have finished the game think, even if they completely disagree with me. Unless some people just don't like seeing progressive attitudes surrounding sexuality represented in video-games, those people can go choke.
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