Coming full circle is a narrative device as old as storytelling itself. Even when the story sucks, it always kind of works. Most of the time, especially nowadays, it comes at the end of a trilogy or a final season of a television series. It’s rare anymore for a single, standalone story to begin and end with an echo. One of those stories is 2013’s The Last of Us, however, and while I wasn’t quite as high on it as many were, the way it begins and ends is beautiful. It starts with a father, Joel, telling his daughter things will be okay as they leave a violent and unknown situation to calm her, unintentionally lying. It ends with that same man intentionally lying to what he sees as his surrogate daughter, Ellie, to justify something he did to save her as they head in an unknown future.
I’m one of those people who never felt the game needed a sequel. Not only does it perfectly come around full circle, in general it tells everything it needs to of the world and its story. But, of course, this was a multimillion seller and one of the most acclaimed games of all time, so obviously it would get one. The Last of Us Part 2 is here now after several delays and many years of waiting, and as great as it is, a coldness still hangs over me.
The first thing you have to address with any discussion about The Last of Us Part 2 is that it’s almost impossible to really deep dive into its story without spoiling it outright. By the time you read this, the game will be officially out, and it went through a very high-profile leak so the biggest spoilers have been on the internet for the better part of three months, but out of respect for those who have managed to stay away and haven’t finished, I won’t go deep into it. All you really need to know is that it’s a tale of revenge, both in the way you think, and in a very different way than you’d expect. It’s set in a world where society has collapsed, and there are zombie-like creatures as the central cause of this, with most people retreating into smaller settlements or militia-run cities.
The plot follows Ellie, now an adult, who once again finds herself out in this brutal, post-societal world. And boy, brutal it is. The first game was known for its intensity and raw violence. You played as Joel then, and when you killed someone, especially when you had to get up close and personal with melee attacks you felt those kills in Joel’s extreme animations and the enemy’s reactions. It’s much the same here, but brought to an even more gut-wrenching degree. Enemies that you stealth kill will gargle or slowly whine as the life drains out of them. Certain explosives will cause some of the nastiest messes I can ever recall seeing in a video game as flesh and blood flop everywhere. When you first get the tripwire mine and get to its testing area, you may want to have a puke bag handy just in case. The game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, said it wasn’t meant to be comfort food, and the sequel does almost everything it can to make you uncomfortable.
But, much like the first game, it wears off.
The game is as long, if not a little longer, than the single player in the first game (there is no multiplayer this go around), and much like the first game the violence and gore just becomes part of the background. Some of that may be part of the point, I imagine, but I think it loses the impact of that second half when you can tell the game wants you to be shocked and disgusted, but you’ve seen so much just by playing it doesn’t hit in that same way.
And that, in and of itself, is really the core to how one will probably feel about this game: it’s more of The Last of Us.
While the game does a similar thing to Naughty Dog’s last title, Uncharted 4, where it teases you with this more open area in the early stages, after awhile you’ll be funneled back into more linear sections and things will become familiar. The combat is improved and more streamlined, but by and large, it too is going to be familiar. While Ellie is the main character this go around, Joel returns and the interaction between the two are sure to put a smile on your face reminding you of the first game.
And much like the first title, the game slowly erodes Ellie’s likability as things continue on. While it’ll undoubtedly be taken differently depending on who you are, odds are you will at least look at her in a very different light when it’s over, much like how by the end of The Last of Us, a lot of players changed their outlook on Joel. While Part 2 does this in a different way, I imagine the game wants us to arrive at very similar feelings about Ellie, though I think how they do that is far less subtle and will be more polarizing when it’s all said and done.
This is a game that embodies, ‘like the first, but bigger and better.’ While that’s often a knock, I’m guessing for most players that’s exactly what they want. Even seven years later, The Last of Us is considered top of its class for most people in its presentation. For a lot of its biggest fans it was probably the first time they’d been exposed to this type of story, of a brutal post-societal place where everyone and everything was a threat and the only way to survive was to be the most brutal. And let’s be honest, not a whole lot of people out there read anymore, so those on the younger side don’t have much knowledge of the raw tales like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Anna Kavan’s Ice. Considering the universally positive reception so far, all this game needed to be was the first game, but more.
It’s not a copy-and-paste job by any means. There are some additions, such as situations where you can use the infected zombie-like creatures against the human enemies, which leads to maybe one of the most stunning sequences in the game at one point. It also has a host of incredible accessibility options with Can I Play It?, a site dedicated to rating accessibility, giving it a rare perfect score across the board for the amount of options it offers for those with disabilities to play. And being more of the same of a game as complex as The Last of Us still equates to about half a decade’s worth of hard work to create. It was by no means a cheap repeat, and will no doubt be the final showcase for what the PS4 can do.
Yet, I felt very much like I did with last year’s Watchmen TV series. It too was a sequel to a narrative that presented a perfect circle in Alan Moore’s classic comic series, maybe the best story to utilize that device in modern literature for my money. It, too, was also fantastic outside a few nagging issues. But there was still a coldness to me for it breaking that perfect circle (there was also a comic book sequel to Watchmen called Doomsday Clock that broke it first, but the less said about that the better). That part of me just couldn’t look past the broken circle. And once a circle is broken, it can never really put back together again.
At least in the case of Watchmen, that show explored a lot of things the comic didn’t. Ultimately, The Last of Us Part 2 explores much of the same themes. They are more refined, and they manage to tackle it in an unexpected way, but the game is ultimately fascinated with the cycle of violence, the brutality of humanity in desperate times, and how heroes can all turn into some real assholes when it’s all said and done, just like the first story. It really doesn’t feel like there’s much added to what The Last of Us was trying to do.
It leaves me in a weird situation where I am left wanting for not more, but less. All the pieces are there, but the picture feels like one I don’t need to put together.
And the counter to that will also be, ‘Well, why does it have to do something new? Can’t it just be a story unto itself?’
It will all come down to who you are and what you what. As I said before, for most people just having a new game with these characters will be more than enough, though I imagine it’ll feel like something of a monkey paw situation for a lot of those folks when the credits roll. I realize with the fanbase and regard the first game garnered, all most people want is just a little more of Ellie and Joel in a new story.
Since traditional reviews have been up for a week before you read this, I imagine most have made up their mind anyway. And I really can’t argue that this game isn’t at the top of the mountain when it comes to certain things, especially on the technical side. The writing is definitely above average, and the performances are honestly pretty sublime, especially Ashley Johnson who returns as Ellie and elevates the whole thing with her work alone. By just about any measure, The Last of Us Part 2 is a great game and one that shows a lot of hard work, sweat and tears certainly went into.
But no matter how good and well-made follow ups may be, there’s still a nagging aspect of how I see the game. Call it silly, call it irrational, even closed minded, but there will always be that part of me that sees the saga of The Last of Us as beginning and ending with a father telling a lie.