The Last of Us: Part II - They Should be Terrified

Mild spoilers for The Last of Us and The Last of Us: Part II

The Last of Us did not need a sequel. Its compelling story of Joel and Ellie, surrogate father and daughter traversing a post-apocalyptic zombie-strewn America, came to a powerful, uncomfortable, and ambiguous ending. Joel’s fateful choice has been upsetting players ever since the game’s release in 2012, and offers up a thoughtful example of a protagonist making what many of us would consider the wrong final choice, but for understandable reasons. For its ending, characters, beautiful ruined landscapes, and intense horror action, it’s been one of my favorite games for years, and I thought it was perfect as it was.

But the wheels of commerce continue to turn, even in our pandemic hellscape, and in June 2020, The Last of Us: Part II dropped like a bomb into the world of games. It quickly became one of the PS4’s best-selling games of all time, and has since inspired widely divergent and polarizing reactions from across the political and fandom spectrums. Everyone has something to say about it.

Yes, me included. I looked out at the world around me and decided that what would help me emotionally would be to play an incredibly dark and violent game in a post-apocalypse caused by a deadly pandemic.

The Last of Us: Part II isn’t an evolution so much as a refinement of the previous game’s mechanics. Instead of Joel, you play this time around as Ellie, now nineteen and a protagonist in her own right. Early on in the game, Ellie suffers a tremendous loss, and spends the rest of the game going on a bloody whirlwind of vengeance against the person responsible, and anyone else who’s unlucky enough to get in her way. Most of this sorry tale takes place over three days in Seattle, now home to a generations-spanning war between the heavily-armed Washington Liberation Front and the cultish Seraphites.

The world is still a pretty awful place, and Ellie will need to sneak, stab, and shoot her way through armies of enemies, both zombie and human alike. The game’s action and horror are still top-notch, but what drives both installments are their character-driven stories, which matched with some incredible acting and photorealistic graphics, make them more like very long and well-made films.

Very dark films.

Let’s get this out of the way: playing The Last of Us: Part II is not a fun experience. It’s bleak. It’s grim. It shoves your face in the worst of humanity and drags you through those muddy roads over and over again. It has moments of real beauty, but they are few and far between, and are often quickly undercut by tragedy and death. I might have killed more people in a video game before, but no other game made me so aware of what I was doing. As Ellie, I slit the necks of hundreds of people while realistic blood spurted out and their friends cried out their names. I plunged my knife into the throats of dogs, blew off people’s limbs, and watched my own character be torn apart at the jaw by a hideous zombie monster like thirty times before I figured out how to beat it.

At the same time, the game controls incredibly well. It’s beautiful. The core gameplay loop of exploring, attempting to sneak past enemies, fighting them once you inevitably get spotted, crafting new weapons and supplies from scraps, and facing off against terrifying zombies is both addicting and satisfying. The characters – both those returning from the previous game and the many new additions – are mostly all well-drawn out, well-acted, and sympathetic, even when we watch them commit some terrible acts. The game is chock full of thrilling set-pieces that blow most of film out of the water. So many individual moments of this game have already been carved into my memory and brought me to tears.

Yet I’m not sure if it was worth it.

"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." It’s a quote often attributed to Confucius that might sum this entire game, but it’s not the most revolutionary concept anymore. We sympathize with Ellie’s motives, and our initial impressions of her enemies aren’t great, but even so, something doesn’t sit right. The journey of the first game was to save the world, making even the worst moments of death and horror seem worth it in the end. But this time around, we’re murdering this much just…to get vengeance? In the year 2020, I don’t think this is the first story most of us have experienced that says that vengeance is a hollow pursuit. We know off the bat that this isn’t going to end well.

But, this isn’t a Bioware RPG or a Life is Strange-style story game where we can choose what our character does in key moments. We have to pick up the controller and continue Ellie’s quest, even as she keeps killing more and more, even after we see more and more of their humanity, even as we start (or continue) to scream at Ellie that this is not the way, that she’s inflicting the same hurt done to her a thousand fold. There are moments where the story pauses, urging us to press the button to brutally murder someone and continue the plot, and I just had to put the controller down. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want Ellie to do it. I wanted more than anything for the game to realize that I was refusing to do this, that I’d learned the lesson, that I thought Ellie should have learned the lesson…but if you don’t press it, nothing happens. Ellie stands there, forever frozen, until you press the button, and bash her next victim’s face in. Again. And again. With each press of the button.

Eventually, all this horror comes to a climax. After three dark and stormy days of dealing death, Ellie finally faces her target, the villain who’s been alluding her – Abby. And then…the camera shifts, time rewinds, and we take control of Abby, back at the start of these three days, for an equal amount of gameplay to come. We see the past three days from the other side, and we learn why they did what they did to Ellie. Ellie is now the shadowy monster at the corner of their story, killing our new friends, all sympathetic and interesting characters, even if some are a bit stereotypical. Frankly, I found myself rooting more for Abby and her friends than for Ellie. It’s a really bold storytelling decision that works well, and it’s honestly one of my favorite parts of this entire experience, especially once we catch back up to that pivotal moment and then continue, sympathetic to both implacable foes. We don’t want either one of these people to kill the other. And yet, here we are. Two people driven to face each other by a string of awful luck and terrible decisions. It’s thrilling stuff, but…

To delve deeper into my problems with TLOU2, I’m going to need you to agree to some basic principles of critique. All stories, including video games, have themes and values. All of them are made by people in the real world, and those values and beliefs will come through, whether or not they’re intended. My biggest problems with this game come from the messages the game seems like it’s trying to say, and how it both makes some serious missteps with their implementation, and also implies some less than ideal messages. On the surface, many of the games lessons ring true, but have more unfortunate implications when you dig deeper.

Both TLOU and TLOU2 take place in a deeply pessimistic and often reactionary post-apocalyptic future, where upon the collapse of civilization, humanity reverts to a Hobbesian war of everyone for themselves. It seems to preach the importance of hope in the face of this despair, and yet it paints any concerted organizing effort to improve the world as naïve at best and doomed at worst. The best hope you can have, these games say, is to find a few people you trust, hole up behind a wall with your guns, and eke out what life you can. Humanity is trapped in a perpetuating cycle of violence and hate, and we’ll never truly escape it. Everyone is just trying to get by. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and the villain in another.

‘Everyone is the hero of their own story’ is a good sentiment. It’s the next step up in our ethical development, when we move past our simplest conceptions of good guys and bad guys. And yet – this will probably be the subject for a longer piece from me later on – there’s a step beyond this one that much of pop culture and politics has yet to grasp. Viewing each person as the hero of their own story turns all of society and history into individual actors fighting each other for their individual gain. It means that large scale conflicts and arguments between people are destructive and pointless, and both sides are at fault. It means that anyone who holds fast to their belief and values to the point of following an ideology is deluded and destined to become corrupt or ineffectual. From the pseudo-revolutionary Fireflies, to the Washington Liberation Front, to the Seraphites – all of TLOU2’s factions are shown as equally dangerous, equally deluded. Any group of people sufficiently devoted to a cause becomes a group of thugs.

But that’s just wrong.

So much of what we’ve achieved as a species has been done by banding together, by recognizing our shared interests and beliefs. A group of people fighting for a better world does not automatically make them a deluded cult. Yes, charismatic leaders can take hold of revolutionary movements. Yes, people can lose sight of what they fought for in the first place. I’m not saying this can’t or doesn’t happen. But I’m also saying it doesn’t have to happen. Humans don’t have just one nature. We’re shaped by the society we live in.

Viewing the world as being made up of individual actors implies that all our conflicts can be solved by just talking it out and finding a compromise. But there are many situations in which there is no compromise to be had, at least not without one side giving up much of their power. See, much of American political thought and pop culture – and both of these games as well – fail to grapple with the question of power. Pop culture loves to show us different factions of roughly equal power, fighting it out in some doomed struggle that’s representative of how humans just can’t ever seem to get it together. ‘If only we could just get along!’ they seem to say.

But reality doesn’t work that way. Huge societal conflicts are never between equal factions. It’s not always two sides. It’s only and always been about power, and how it’s distributed.

In addition, the cycles of violence narrative that this game builds itself around implies that people will only ever respond to violence with violence, that we're all bloodthirsty and incapable of making decisions that benefit humanity as a whole even if they go against our immediate, obvious self-interest. But humans have been sacrificing themselves for greater causes and at costs to themselves forever, banding together to fight for people we don't know, to demand justice even if that means surrendering our own unfair power advantages.

In its effort to paint these factions of humanity as doomed to eternal cycles of violence, TLOU2 paints a vision of the future – and of the present – that’s not just “problematic,” but wrong.

Much of the hate being piled on this game by the worst of gamer culture is similar to a lot of the hate Star Wars: The Last Jedi received – racist, sexist, bigoted hate towards a story that offers more inclusion and diversity than previous installments. Ellie has a Jewish girlfriend, Dina, (who’s a delightful character, by the way) there is a notable trans character, and many characters aren’t straight, white, Christian men, etc. Needless to say, these “critiques” are hateful and not worth dealing with.

TLOU2 is much better in terms of diversity than its predecessor, but…its attempts often backfire. There’s no deeper examination or unpacking of gender and race in this game, which, given its high body-count, just means that, wow, now Ellie can brutally murder women and black people too! Gee, isn’t that fun?

The other major piece of hate people have is with the death that fuel’s Ellie’s thirst for vengeance, and then how the game makes you play as and sympathize with her enemy, Abby. Frankly, I don’t know how people could play through this game and not end up loving Abby. She’s awesome, and while she definitely has her own share of demons and sins…they pale in comparison to Ellie’s. So, I don’t have a problem with those narrative decisions either.

Yet the game still makes me uncomfortable, both in ways I think were intentional and in ways I think weren’t.

I’ve played many games that lasted longer than 30 hours, but I’ve never played a game of this length that felt this long. I don’t entirely mean that as a negative, but the story has so many arcs and acts that when I thought the game was in its final scene, I had several more acts to go. There’s a moment where the game should have ended…and then it keeps going, sliding down deeper and deeper into the darkness for reasons I still don’t understand. After everything else that she’s lost even since beginning this bloody quest, surely Ellie finally gets what we’ve understood since the beginning, that a ruthless pursuit of vengeance is bound to hurt her too. And yet, Ellie keeps going. The game shoves guns back in your hand and keeps going.

TLOU2 wants to show the kind of monster that you’d actually become if you dealt out as much death as the average video games protagonist. It wants to show that violence begets violence. It wants us to know that every person we kill in this game has a name, and friends, who will shout out their name in fear and anger when they discover what you’ve done. It wants you to feel the blood on your hands.

And yet, there’s no way to get around it. Sure, you can play the game while trying to kill as few people as possible, but Ellie and Abby kill enough people in the cut-scenes that you can’t get around. And the game clearly wants you to kill. It gives you new toys and more powerful weapons, and gleefully stands back to let you use them.

If – like me – you’re tired of this, you want Ellie to just stop…all you can do is put down the game and refuse to play. If you want to keep going, you have to kill.

And then, after all this, the game seems to point to you and say, “wow, don’t you feel bad for killing people?” But it never gave us – or Ellie – the chance to do anything else.

After all this violence and death, what is the point of this game? What does TLOU2 want to say?

That vengeance is bad? We already knew that going in, or if we didn’t, the story beats this into our heads so many times before Ellie ever learns it, to the point that it seems excessive and even counter-productive.

That we’re all the protagonists of our own stories and the villains of others? As I’ve gone into already, this is a good counter to lots of pop culture, but doesn’t quite go far enough in making a relevant and interesting statement. I do admit, though, that I haven’t seen any game do this kind of perspective shift this well before, and I think this audacious choice has earned the game hate from some of the worst kinds of people, which is always a plus in my book.

I don’t know what our takeaway is supposed to be about Ellie. We’ve watched this character we grew to love in the first game burn away everything inside her, ruin all her relationships, all because of hurt and anger. We watched the villain of a thousand other stories be born.

Maybe I shouldn’t try to take away grand theories of sociology, politics, or ethics from this game. At the end of the day, it’s just this story, between these characters. Maybe it’s just a tragedy. There’s a place for stories like this. I know most people don’t really want that right now, but I always seem drawn to these kinds of tales. Maybe I should leave it at that, and not going poking deeper for some grand answer.

But TLOU2 wants to be epic, and serious, and profound. It wants to be deep and complex and thoughtful. It wants to be a work of art, so I’m going to give it the respect it deserves, and treat it as such. The old excuse of “it’s just a game” is trite and is never going to work for me anyway.

So if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably left with the takeaway that I think The Last of Us: Part II is bad. And you’d be…wrong? Right? Both?

It kept me enthralled through a relentlessly bleak and violent 30 hours (all played amidst, well, everything that’s going on in the real world now), with beautiful graphics and genuinely thrilling game-play. It has well-written and acted characters with heartrending and thrilling moments, who carried me through a compelling story that wears itself out so much that it might retroactively poison everything before it. It’s so graphically violent that it makes me not want to tell or experience any violent fiction for a good long while. It mars some really interesting narrative decisions with a whole host of uncomfortable implications on the political and moral level that go against the things I value. And I haven’t even begun to talk about the soul-crushingly intense work culture at Naughty Dog, who often forced its employees into 100-hour work weeks to make this thing. I don’t think any piece of art is worth that suffering.

It exhausts me. It thrills me. I love it. I hate it. I’m tired of reading about it. All I want to do is talk about it. I have a few more essays about different parts of it in me. It makes me uncomfortable in ways I don't think it intends to. I'll probably call it my favorite game of the year.

So, should you play it?

I don’t fucking know.