I'm not going to spoil the game for you. I just need to note down somewhere some thoughts that had gone through my head as I finished the game. I started playing on Friday morning and, new puppy allowing, played every chance I got to finish a couple of hours into the evening today. It's been a wild, thought-filled ride.
I was fortunate in that I had not been spoilt by the game leaks. I still don't know what was actually revealed. All I saw of the game was the trailers, including the game play trailer. And so I didn't have any negative feelings or expectations that I brought with me, except for the one concern I had - one that in the end wasn't founded.
So what can I say about the game without spoiling it?
The Last of Us Part 2 continues the story of Ellie as she loses herself to vengeance. After an incident of extreme loss, Ellie goes to Seattle to track down those whom she believed wronged her.
The game is very emotionally charged, and poses a number of questions about vengeance and crossing lines without ever having the characters ask them so directly. How far would you go to gain recompense? When is it enough? What is left of you when all you have left is your rage? What separates us from them?
In many ways, the story is pretty brutal and I'll admit that I shed more than one tear throughout. It wasn't as gut wrenching as I was expecting though... but maybe it's because it didn't nearly fuck me up as much as Mass Effect 3 did emotionally. I was sad, I was worried, I was invested, but I wasn't gutted. Which is not a bad thing to say of the game, but gives me a way to measure the intensity of it. There were some things in terms of pacing that initially didn't make sense to me or that I felt I didn't care about at the time of playing, but it became relevant later on in the game. More than anything, this game is a story and how willing you are to hear it from the writers will determine your satisfaction in it, I think.
This seems like a good enough segue into the acting - which was phenomenal. I'm still insanely impressed by what one can do with motion capture and the methods employed in this game to have the actors tell the story. The range of emotions on the faces made me forget that I was looking at something that wasn't real. My mother walked into the room multiple times and, despite some mentions of the extremity of the violence, she was also captivated by the 'realness' of the characters as people. I suppose, as a Critical Role fan, I'm biased when it comes to Ashley Johnson and Laura Bailey, but they really knocked it out of the park. I was incredibly impressed by Laura's performance as she played a character that I would never have imagined her to play physically and vocally. It was disarming. Troy Baker played his role with the same expert skill that I've come to expect from anything he commits himself to.
Gameplay, as expected, is very close to the first game in some ways. There was a sense to me of not fixing something that isn't broken, but they did improve on some aspects as well. Which was great. I played the game on Moderate, with the exception of one particularly nasty infected that spent over an hour ripping my character to pieces until I decided I've seen enough of that cinematic and popped it over to Light. I was challenged. I like stealth games (which is funny because I'm not good at it), so Ellie did a lot of shooting and running for her life as people/critters chased her. The gameplay is solid. Ellie is far more agile than Joel, but she's also a lot smaller. So you have to think about how you're taking on your opponent physically and also how you're going to navigate the world. Not everything within Joel's reach is within Ellie's. So that was interesting.
Bugs: I didn't have the day one patch (I'm nearing the limit of my data cap), so I did have a few bugs, but nothing terrible. I had to restart the programme once due to an error popping up and once I had to kill my character by drowning because the screen went weird. Which was interesting as that was the only time my character drowned while playing and I got to watch the acting instead of freaking out about the lack of breath (I tend to freak out about stuff like that). But those were the worst and probably fixed with the update.
With the passing of time, I think I will probably come back to playing the Last of Us Part 2 again, but not immediately. I think it's going to stick with me for a long time though - as all good, meaningful stories do. I feel the game has left a mark on my soul... I think that's the best compliment I can give it.
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