The Last of Us: Part II (2020 Video Game)
5/10
As a fan, I'm just sad.
19 June 2020
As a fan of the first game, I was absolutely HYPED for this game. When The Last of Us 2 opens up, you get a beautiful world, familiar soundtrack, and the return of both of the characters we all grew to love in the first game, Joel and Ellie. For the first 2 hours of gameplay, you feel right at home in the world. But it soon begins to fall apart. It is hard for someone who has replayed the first game multiple times to realize that the sequel is not up to par. TLOU is about characters and story. Many people, myself included, did not play the game for the gameplay, which is just like a lot of other games. It was the story and the chemistry between Joel and Ellie as a father-daughter duo that drew us all in. Part two feels like it completely disregards the relationship established in the first and the characters seem to change personality and consistency just to further the plot along. There are times where the characters feel like a different character entirely and I was left thinking, "(insert character name) wouldn't have done that. They were smarter than that."

After about 7 hours of gameplay, it begins to feel flat. In a world full of undead, even the living lose life. The story becomes cliche and predictable, and there is a section that is about 10 hours long that focuses on things that have nothing to do with the main story except that it is trying to establish a backstory for a new character. In the first game you learned about the characters as they pushed through the story, a 10 hour flashback was not needed to establish the characters. A lot of the times, things were just unnecessary and by the halfway point I was just wanting it to be over because I was just bored.

Boring is not a word I would like to use to describe The Last of Us 2, but it is what it is.

The ending is anticlimactic and it feels as if the game was trying too hard to be artsy and deep instead of just telling a good story. I felt so much emotion for these characters in the first game, and to this day I can't get through the prologue without crying, but I felt nothing in part 2. The characters feel so different and inconsistent that if it weren't for the fact that clickers were present, you could easily forget that this is even a TLOU game.

All that said, the graphics, soundtrack, and acting are phenomenal. The story, is flat and feels more dead than the undead themselves.

This game is definitely getting bombed by negative reviews on purpose, but don't just ignore the audience score because of that because there are some valid reasons for disliking this game.
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