Giant Bomb Presents: The Last of Us Part II Spoilercast

@dooley: it’s a very predictable plot.

Ah classic comment section - trolls just nitpicking stuff Abby said and not talking about the substance of anyone else’s comments.

Appreciate some media out there admitting the story and characters are poorly written. The production value is so high , that I feel like some people got blinded by it in the story category. I definitely fell victim to that in previous games .Also, being different doesn't automatically make it good. The gameplay is masterful though .

Right? I found it so weird how everyone just took for granted the "right" choice is to sacrifice someone you deeply care about for maybe saving humanity. A moral stand they themselves when put in that situation are unlikely to take. The choice to save Ellie was to me one of the most human moments of TLOU 1.

@lanechanger: I never felt any of it was cheesy or manipulative. It's all very intentional and weighed against the backdrop of the story. This is the life Ellie is living and this is the life Abby is living. These two characters on the surface level are dealing with similar problems but when you look deeper they are motivated by very different life experiences.

A lot of long form writing about games in the past several years has conditioned people to try to over analyze a lot of very basic slice of life storytelling with the intent to gleam some hidden depths. In the process you really end up missing the forest for the trees as you try to constantly looks whats around the corner instead of enjoying what is right there in front of you. Abby's entire point of view is there to show that despite her ruthless act of vengeance she is a human being like any else, connected with a web of relationships that are deeply affected by her actions. It isn't groundbreaking "gotcha" storytelling, it's unique specifically because it's so very basic. While people are waiting for this amazing justification the game is constantly trying to tell you that there is nothing extraordinary about tragedy. Tragedy is often very mundane but it's after effect are very powerful.

Abby hit the nail on the head when she said this game was manipulative. I 100% agree. I felt like the writers wanted me to like certain things sooo much instead of just having characters be themselves and letting the player decide if they liked them or not.

And the pacing killed the second half of the game for me. I was so invested in Ellie and her story that I couldn't care less about Abby, and the game so desperately wanting me to like this character ruined her for me. Just because she pets a dog doesn't make up for the fact she killed a character I was invested in.

And these flashbacks. Holy shit. Nothing kills the momentum of a game or story for me than flashbacks. The timing and substance of the flashbacks were puzzling to me. Joel's death came pretty early for me and didn't hit me like I thought it should have. It would've hit me harder if I knew he told Ellie what really happened at the end of the first game and that they were trying to repair their relationship.

Great discussion, crew!

yeah- i ended up feeling pretty differently about the game than she did, but the predictable pile-on that seems to be materializing in these comments is the exact kind of bullshit i had hoped the gb community would avoid.

it's fine to disagree yall, but direct your constructive comments towards the content of what they're saying, not the individual. if your comment is akin to "no you're wrong for feeling that way," i suggest you delete and move on.

Yup, people really have nothing better to do with their time...

I find it so odd that none of the spoiler casts I’ve listened to for this game mention the boss fight. I thought the section w the huge monster was so terrible. It could have been very cool, but the FOV made it very difficult to run away and resulted in me dying probably 25 times, thus ruining the whole sequence. Maybe I was just bad at that moment?

@ozzie: @spankingaddict: It's odd. Sometimes I think I should respond to unfair vitriol thrown at the crew other times I don't know if it's worth it. People should be called out and held accountable for their terrible behavior, but I also don't want to spend all my time calling it out.

The whole sidequest with Lev was a bit of a stretch to me. In 20 years time, during a Zombie invasion, would anyone really care about a fellow human's gender or sexual orientation, when there are literal flesh eating Zombies on the doorstep to worry about? Crazy cults are such a generic and lazy trope in Zombie fiction.

Thats sort of my take on it as well. Maybe it's because I'm a dad and projected a bit when i played TLOU1. But i would still shoot that damn doctor again.

Listening to the Game Informer interview the the two main writers is a much better use of your time.

Dont bother defending the lame take that the game theme is VIOLENCE = bad/ That's been a reductive and distracting take since the trailers released and bandwagon hate jumped on mostly from those who disliked LGBT or PS4 exclusive. Obviously some legit critics said this but overall If you take is so simplified it does nothing for me, and makes me think you're a gamer that only dives surface level in media that ask you to do more. I use this alot but the story mimicked my feelings on hunter x hunter's last arc or so about evil/hatred and revenge that people enjoyed yet hated when done in last of us. Obviously, the last of us 2 wasn't as well equipped to showcase this theme of love, hate, redemption, and the nuanced grays of it all. I think that's where most are so taken off by this game. It needed a better way to meet people who didn't want to feel like they were trudging through a bleak tale for bleakness' sake. I think it did this via flashbacks but that narrative device is marred with confusing and often it works best to linearly showcase the journey like hXh did satisfyingly. If you want to wiki what I meant or watch a video please do.

@ryno9881: I completely agree! At times, the game's desperate attempts to craft parallels between Abby and Ellie become its biggest fault, and is a large cause of the "cheese." Yet for all of its attempts to show how Abby and Ellie are similar, it completely ignores the most meaningful distinction between them- Abby is a happy member of a systemic violence machine and Ellie isn't. She reports unquestioningly to a torturer. She works for an organization that hides landmines to kill indiscriminately. While Abby eventually seems to find a conscience, it's only in the waning moments of the game, and when you consider how her final encounter with Isaac concludes, she never really has to answer for her role in that machine.

Add on top of that how Abby's vendetta is motivated by her father's eagerness to murder an unconscious child, and the way she revels in torturing Joel after he and Tommy save her life, and her entire campaign seems evil and unjustified.

Naughty Dog is welcome to explore both sides of a conflict, but I don't for one second buy that Ellie and Abby are similar people, except for the notion that both have been defeated when Santa Barbara concludes.

The toxicity in the comments here are reminding me a lot of the Brad Nicholson days and y'all should be fucking ashamed of yourselves.

Great podcast! Lots of good insight. lol my favorite parts though were Brad and Abby R fighting to speak since they both tend to talk over people a bit.

I just want to say, it made me uncomfortable to hear Brad continually interrupting Abby when she hadn't finished her thought. This happened multiple times. It never happens on the Beastcast. Please try to be better.

The defensiveness around this game reminds me that video games have a long way to go. In any other medium this story would be viewed as basic ass revenge story that it is. But because unlimited money was poured into the it looks far more polished than was that hypothetical TV show would look like, which gives it undo importance. This is a really pedestrian revenge narrative that has some really amazing actors and craft behind it.

Last piece of content and discourse I ever want to hear about this game.

link? There's so many things on this game I haven't really looked at anything on this game, other than some of GB's coverage, I don't even think all of it.

More like the Giant whine cast

Just so you guys know, about the last subject on the podcast. Neil Druckmann confirmed it, about the title screen change, meaning that Abby and Lev made it, and that's Catalina Island.

@dawgs4life: I thought it was one of the better parts of the game and the part I did die on was fighting the little stinker at the end but that only happened once. Different people will have different experiences I guess. Normally I hate chase sequences but I dunno, that whole part leaned into the horror aspect in a way I appreciated.

Except it does matter. Having severe pacing issues with an overbloated story structure are legit complaints.

Is it a good game? sure the gameplay aspects of it are. But just about most of the story elements i disliked about this game.

IF you haven't listened to it sure. You sound like a Resetera User. Its better than "Inside Neil Druckmans butthole" like a lot of the other TLOU2 podcasts are.

Its a super cynical podcast that opened up with "First off, I really liked this game." But its cynical and whiny because "I liked this game" is not enough praise. Its gotta be praise all the way down for some folks.

Everyone was talking over everyone on this whole thing. But when women do it, it's bad!

God damn there are some embarrassing comments here.

Playing TLOU2 I enjoyed the Stealth/Action gameplay quite a bit, and didn't much care about the Broad strokes of the plot. I did enjoy a bunch of smaller character moments though.

I wish there was rad multiplayer like the 1st game had.

Curious thought about the design of the game, let me know what you think anyone:

@c_toc: 100%. For a game I'm deeply frustrated by, the Waypoint pods felt like they were willing to chew on alot of the messy shit in this game and get into it. Points of conversation that feel... uhhh... feel seriously underbaked here?

My thoughts on the podcast:

• Folks interrupted each other a lot. As a result, there was a lot of talking over/past someone. I felt like there wasn't a lot of space for the topics or ideas to breath.
• The podcast felt a bit aimless, which wasn't helped by folks interrupting each other. I feel like they could've used some kind of agenda of talking points. It says a lot when there was some disagreement with how much they wanted to talk about the ending of TLOU1 at the start of the podcast.

My thoughts on the game:

• I thought Abby's sections were much better than Ellie's sections, which really dragged and weren't that interesting from a story or gameplay point of view. Abby's sections had a lot more story, a lot more character development, and cooler set pieces to play around with (the sky bridge, the island, the hotel basement, etc.).
• Ellie might be one of the least likeable video game protagonists I've ever had to play as. I started out liking her, but began disliking her during Seattle Day 1. And that dislike grew stronger pretty fast. Which might've been the point, now that I think about it. I started out loving Ellie, grew to dislike her pretty fast, and then grew to dislike her even more as the story progressed. Meanwhile, I started out disliking Abby, grew to like her pretty fast, and ended up hoping Abby would win the fight in the theater.
• I hated that somehow Ellie, Dina, and Tommy all survived the theater encounter. Even though Ellie was beaten to hell, Dina had her face slammed into the ground multiple times and had an arrow through her body, and Tommy was shot in the head. I was convinced it was a dream sequence up until Ellie went to Santa Barbara, at which point I had a "wait, really!?" moment.