God Only Knows It’s Not What We Would Choose To Do: The Last of Us Part II Review

The Last of Us Part II does many things well, but in trying to do more, it loses the thing that made the first revolutionary.

The original The Last of Us — The Last of Us “Part 1”, I suppose — was a groundbreaking and historic videogame because it was the first major triple-A game where everything made sense in the realistic world you occupied. Until The Last of Us, every major triple-A game that tried to be realistic contained at least one element whose presence was justified by saying, “well, you know, this is a videogame, so it has to be this way.”

The Last of Us was remarkable because it didn’t contain any of those compromises. Every element was justified and each part of the game logically fed into every other part of the game. It was uniquely cohesive in a way no other games of its era were. (It is, you might say, “a great game…by default.”) Yes, you kill a lot of people and zombies, but your character has survived the apocalypse long enough that it makes sense that they’d be a skilled killer. Yes, you spend hours opening drawers and cabinets looking for crafting materials, but that makes sense because resources are scarce and you’re burning those resources throughout your journey. Yes, you’re on a vital yet suicidal mission, but the journey actually seems like it could make a difference and the person embarking on it has nothing to lose, so all of that makes sense.

This accomplishment left Naughty Dog in an interesting spot when it came to creating a sequel. On the one hand, having created this uniquely believable world, they could just give it a new coat of paint and release basically the same game again. That is, essentially, what so many videogame sequels are. But on the other hand, if they wanted to, as Neil Druckman said the first time around, “change the fucking industry” again, they’d need more than just a reboot. They would need to do something huge and new to deliver the same level of creative innovation they did the first time.

The Last of Us Part II feels like it tries to have it both ways. It wants to deliver the same familiar gameplay experience in the same post-apocalyptic setting with the same dark somber feel, but it also wants to stretch further than the first game and use a longer, more detailed plot to communicate a deeper, more nuanced message. However, by reaching in both directions at the same time, the sequel begins to lose the cohesion that made the original such an accomplishment. And, in the end, The Last of Us Part Two often feels like the kind of game that The Last of Us was trying to evolve past.

*** SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE LAST OF US AND THE LAST OF US PART II ***

There was only one moment in the original The Last of Us where my immersion was well and truly broken.

When I found myself (as Joel) bursting into the operating room and holding at gunpoint the surgeons that were about to kill Ellie, I, for some reason, did not think I needed to shoot anyone. I planned on making my way toward Ellie, picking her up, and leaving the room, all while keeping my pistol’s sights trained on the surgeons. This, of course, is not what the game wants you to do, and after spending about two minutes circling the room trying to get the “pick up Ellie” button prompt to appear, I realized that my only option was to shoot the main surgeon.

This was the only time I can recall in The Last of Us where it felt even a little bit strange to kill someone in a narrative, role-playing sense. Throughout the rest of the game, everyone and everything was trying to kill me, so I didn’t feel too guilty about fighting — it was self defense! But these characters (especially the other two doctors) weren’t really fighting me, they were also just defending themselves.

Having to shoot the surgeon was this rare moment where the game’s swiss watch-like gears buckled a bit. But, as a simple moment designed to make a pivotal plot beat interactive, I overlooked it. Little did I know, this one moment would become the point around which the entire plot of The Last of Us Part II revolves.

To make a very long story very short, a woman named Abby and a group of her friends have hiked to Jackson, where Ellie and Joel are now living among a large group of survivors who have resurrected some semblance of civilization in a tiny town. Abby encounters Joel and Tommy while fleeing a horde of zombies, and once the trio escapes the horde, Abby immediately starts torturing Joel. Ellie comes to his rescue, but only arrives in time to see him get beaten to death with a golf club. After a short recovery, Ellie surmises that the murderous group was part of the Washington Liberation Front, or WLF, so she and her romantic partner, Dina, venture to Seattle to find the group and reap revenge.

The story hasn’t even really started yet, and we already see all the new directions this game is stretching toward. We have so many new characters (even a new playable character, as we take control of Abby in a few scenes) and these new characters bring new layers of drama and conflict that must be navigated. This world in which there is some semblance of safety and security is new. And the gameplay, which is at times almost more reminiscent of The Last of Us: Left Behind in its willingness to let long interactive sequences run their course without the typical interruption of zombie-killing action, is new(-ish).

And yet, this stretching is already beginning to tear this game at the seams. The Last of Us was a brutally simple game. You played a man who had almost nothing to live for, who transports a girl across the country because of the small glimmer of hope she contains. You killed because there was no other option. You pressed forward because what else is there to do?

This simplicity was the breakthrough. It all made sense because everything was perfectly aligned. There was violence, yes, but in a violent world. There was crafting, yes, but in a world where supplies were limited. There was an urgent, pressing mission, yes, but in a world where it really did feel like all of humanity rested on that mission.

But now, in The Last of Us Part II, things are radically different. Our protagonist is not a lonely, individual man, but a woman who’s part of a community, who has friends and loved ones. Because of your community, you no longer have to live like the ferocious animal you were in the first game. In this world, the violence is contained to safely dispatching zombies while on patrol. The crafting happens by specialized tradespeople. And your new mission — your quest for revenge — is understood by your peers, but not necessarily endorsed.

But this is The Last of Us. We must kill zombies. We must stealth around people. We must hunt for scissors in drawers so that we can duct tape them to the baseball we found in a garage.

And so we do.

Once Dina and Ellie make it to Seattle, the game’s traditional loot-craft-fight cycle is given room to breathe. The Seattle levels are much more expansive than anything found in the original The Last of Us — the first section of “Seattle Day 1” even allows for a pseudo-free roam section — but it is still the basic activities the first game offered. Ellie and Dina are quickly captured by the WLF (found them!) but escape with just enough information to set up a base of operations at an abandoned theater nearby.

After intercepting some WLF radio chatter, Dina and Ellie deduce the locations of their targets and Ellie goes hunting for them. She usually just misses the chance to kill them herself after fighting through wave after wave of enemies because Joel’s brother Tommy is a few days ahead of Ellie’s schedule on the same revenge mission. But, eventually, Ellie blazes out on her own to confront her primary nemesis, Abby.

Interspersed among these acts are flashbacks that shed light on Ellie and Joel’s relationship. In one scene, the two tour an abandoned science museum, culminating in a magnificent sequence where Ellie imagines being an astronaut and taking off in a spaceship. But, as beautifully executed as these scenes are, they don’t really tell us anything new. Ellie is able to confirm that Joel interrupted the surgery that would’ve taken her life, but it’s hard to watch the last scene of The Last of Us and think she doesn’t already know that in her heart. I suspected (at first) that these scenes are supposed to slowly explain Ellie’s motive for revenge, but the connection was never quite established for me. They beautifully illustrate Joel and Ellie’s complex, tragic relationship, but they also seem detached from what we’re doing in the main plot.

After roughly 15 hours of gameplay, the game’s big twist is revealed. Abby has found Ellie’s theater hideout and, just as the two enter into a standoff, the game cuts to black and surprises us with “Seattle Day 1,” the same title card we saw when we began the Seattle section. We then begin playing through Abby’s storyline, which runs parallel to Ellie’s.

Everything about Abbie’s game is the same as Ellie’s but a little different. Instead of Ellie’s bolt action rifle, Abbie’s long gun is a semi-automatic carbine. Instead of collecting superhero trading cards, like Ellie does, Abbie collects 50 State Quarters. Abby has physical characteristics that can be upgraded with supplements, just like Ellie, but Abby’s upgrade paths are different.

It’s disorienting to start from scratch in the middle of the game, and it’s frustrating when you realize that you’re going to have to wait another fifteen hours before you learn how the game’s climax is going to revolve. But the chance to see the story from a different angle is an intriguing idea, and the game seems to be saying, “hey, you came here to kill, right? So let’s go kill some more!”

“But do I want to kill more?” I replied in my mind as I settled into the second half of the game. The combat in this game provides a quandary. It is “fun” to sneak around and outwit your AI opponents, but the actual depiction of defeating them — you know, murdering them — is rendered in the most explicitly gruesome way. Bodies flail as life leaves them, throats gurgle loudly as they’re slit, enemies beg for their life when they’re one hit from death (which only prompts a slower, more brutal execution animation from you), other AIs shout the names of their fallen comrades (a technique that’s profoundly moving the first time it happens, but gets redundant quickly.) I get that the game wants to show me the brutality of “my” actions, but by doing it so effectively, my conscience takes over and makes me want to stop.

The twist also serves to drive home one of the game’s big messages: “Ellie and Abby? You thought they were good versus evil? They’re not. They’re the same!” This idea is less profound than the game would like you to believe. If you go in with even the slight back-of-the-box knowledge that this is a game about the perpetual cycle that revenge creates, it’s instantly very easy to assume that Abby is in some way equal to Ellie. If you’re part of the same endless cycle, how different can you really be?

But Abby’s perspective also serves to illustrate the game’s themes on a more macro level, while Ellie’s story remains on a more personal micro scale. Abby’s story revolves around the WLF’s conflict with a rival mini-civilization called the Seraphities. Throughout another fifteen hours of killing zombies and Seraphites (and eventually fellow WLF members) the game dissects how hate takes hold among rival populations. The game teaches you to hate the Saraphites — they’re animalistic religious zealots that have been brainwashed into killing for sport! — but then, once Abby meets two young Saraphies who have fled their home named Yara and Lev, she begins to see that their two societies are not so different.

The lesson culminates in the revelation of why Yara and Lev fled their home. Lev is transgender, and the Saraphites want to punish his rejection of a traditional gender role with death. In this moment, the game ties its fictional story to the real world all too well. It’s hard to imagine which real-world society the Saraphies are meant to reflect when they demand that Lev conform to a certain gender because there are so many options to choose from.

Abby begins to exhibit the change Ellie is unable to make. She realizes the cycle of pain and violence must stop, and the symbolic off ramp for that cycle is Santa Barbara, where the thought to be defunct Fireflies may have established a foothold. However, before she can get there, she gets tangled in the WLF’s all-out war on the Saraphites, which ignites as she is rescuing Lev in a scene that both seems over the top (the town literally burns to the ground as you sneak between and occasionally fight the two warring armies) and an appropriate depiction of the hell on earth that war always is.

After escaping the warzone — and after around 27 cumulative hours of killing across both storylines — the endgame finally begins. We return to the Ellie/Abby standoff and, after a brutal fight, Abby ends up trapping Ellie in a checkmate with her knife to Dina’s throat, but she decides to let them both live.

Just when you think it’s over, the game does not let up. The two intertwining storylines continue with Abby getting in communication with the Fireflies (yay!) just before getting captured by a particularly torturous SoCal gang (boo!), and Ellie living a quiet life with Dina and newborn JJ in the house from Christina’s World. Tommy pops in to visit Ellie (he’s missing an eye) and explains that Abby is in Santa Barbara. Ellie decides to pursue Tommy’s lead, and Dina says that her decision is forcing her to take JJ and leave.

At this point, all the “Why?s” of the last 27 hours all come flooding back at once. Once again, just as at the beginning of the game, Ellie is in the world she was trying to save in The Last of Us. She is home, with loved ones, safe and content. But when the chance for revenge presents itself, she blindly pursues it. The costs of going are illustrated — Dina isn’t kidding when she said she would leave — but what’s driving Ellie is still something of a mystery. Just once I wanted someone, anyone, to tell Ellie this won’t fix anything.

But that lesson has not yet been learned. So Ellie heads to Santa Barbara, kills some zombies, makes her way inside the camp of the gang that abducted Abby, and, after rampaging through the facility, finds Abby and Lev strung up on posts in the ocean. She cuts them down and, just as Abby and Lev are about to escape, Ellie forces Abby into one last fight by threatening Lev. They fight. Ellie has Abby cornered and is about to drown her in shallow water when she gets one of the flashbacks that has plagued her throughout the entire game.

But this one is different. Usually Ellie sees a flash of Joel’s bloody, brutalized face. But now, as she’s about to kill Abby, she sees Joel playing guitar on his front porch. She relents and releases Abby who exits with Lev.

We then get to the payoff of this thirty hour experience. Ellie returns to her and Dina’s home. She’s missing her ring and index finger, which were bitten off in her fight with Abby. The house is empty, except for one room, which contains all of Ellie’s belongings, including a guitar that Joel gave her at the beginning of the game. She sits down and begins to play. But she can’t. Her fingers are gone. She can only hold down half the strings.

In this moment, the game finally got me. Tears started to well in the corner of my eyes. The game finally established the tragic conclusion we’d been waiting for. Ellie’s thirst for revenge finally exacted it’s toll. It stripped away the ability to create beauty that Joel had given her. As you strum the guitar and hear the discordant thunk of half-held strings, all your actions come back to haunt you. This moment — an interactive moment, as you must “play” the guitar minigame that’s popped up a few times before this moment — is the most innovative and narratively powerful moment in the entire game.

But — holy shit — it’s taken 30 hours of slogging through brutality to get here. This moment is moving and powerful, but I don’t know if it’s proportional to the lead up. It asks if the trade Ellie made was worth it, but I’ve been pondering that for a while now. And, being the soul that’s guiding her through this machine, I’ve wanted so often to stop. I silently hoped after rescuing Abby and seeing that there were two boats in the water, that the game was letting me choose: I could walk left and fight Abby, or walk right and simply row away. But I didn’t have that choice. I’ve never had a choice.

There is one final cutscene in which Ellie talks to Joel. It’s (unknowingly) the last conversation they’ll ever share. Ellie says she was supposed to die in that hospital, that her death would’ve given her life meaning. Joel says that if he had it to do all over again, he would. Ellie says she wants to forgive Joel, but she’s not sure if she can.

As Carolyn Petit explains, it shows that Ellie has been acting from a place of shame for being alive:

I suddenly saw in a new way the fundamental tension between the way Joel sees Ellie and the way she sees herself. He sees her as someone who deserves a shot at living, at loving and being loved. In fact, when he had the choice between saving Ellie or saving the world, he decided that Ellie was the world worth saving.

But she doesn’t see herself that way. She carries around so much shame for being alive. She probably sees her entire legacy as violence; all the people who weren’t saved by a vaccine, the entire state of the world. Suddenly it struck me that when she walked away from Dina to go to Santa Barbara, saying “I have to finish it” (while I screamed at the screen, “No, you fucking don’t!”), it wasn’t really about avenging Joel, or at least not just about that. It was about the shame she still carried around. It was because she hadn’t yet heard what Joel had said to her that night, that she deserved to love and be loved, too. It was because she didn’t think she deserved to be there with Dina, getting a shot at happiness.

She was still acting from the wounded place inside her. The place that loves Joel but didn’t get to do the work of learning to forgive him for prioritizing her life over everyone else’s. Their messy future of fumbling toward forgiveness was stolen from them both but Ellie’s the one who has to live in the absence. When she lets Abby go, there’s nothing left to distract her. She’s alone with her own brokenness. She has to truly confront it at last.

The fundamental problem here is that, at so many points in this process, we want, through our choices as a player, to let Ellie confront her brokenness and break this cycle. It’s the same feeling I had when The Last of Us forced me to kill Abby’s dad in the first game.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that? Abby is the daughter of the surgeon you have to kill in the first The Last of Us. The one moment that broke my immersion, the one time I felt the game made me kill someone for an unmotivated reason, is the moment that precipitated this entire game. And, strangely, that feels appropriate. Because it’s that feeling that defined this entire game for me. Because Ellie’s motivation isn’t revealed until the end of the game, we spend 30 hours thinking why am I doing this? What’s my motivation?

And that’s the exact problem that the original The Last of Us was trying to solve. Until The Last of Us, every game made us think that. None of them added up. But The Last of Us said, “Hey, here’s a way to do it that makes sense. Where the violence is logical instead of gratuitous. Where the scavenging is appropriate for the context. Where the crafting feels necessary.”

It laid a path away from the unmotivated, because it’s a videogame and that’s how videogames work way of the past. But now this game, because all of its pieces are no longer aligned and properly motivated, feels like one of the games from that past. And not just one of them, but — with its brutal death animations and moments of naked, pitiless hate — perhaps one of the most egregious examples.

I don’t mean to bash this game because it does so much, so so well. The performances are stunningly life-like, in both their voice performances and their animation. The writing is sharp. The plot, for its foibles, kept me intrigued. The music is beautiful. But none of those things that are great throughout the entire game are interactive. (Except the guitar thing.) I wish that quality could’ve applied to the entire game and not just the cutscenes and prestige tours. Because, in the end, that’s what can make games more powerful than all the other media that’s out there: choice and interactivity and getting the chance to make characters do what you want them to do and seeing what happens. I know it’s a tall order, but it’s also what I expect from games that want to “change the fucking industry.”

In my review of the original The Last of Us, I concluded by noting how a newly released game had failed to clear the bar that The Last of Us set. It was plagued by the same old problems of unmotivated gameplay systems that we had seen so many times before. Games had evolved, but this one hadn’t.

The Last of Us Part II does many things incredibly well, but it hasn’t evolved either.