The Last Of Us Director Neil Druckmann Is Now Co-President Of Naughty Dog

@sabredj: you can not like a story without lying to yourself about it being bad writing. The writing was very good. Content and quality can be rated separately.

@Blk_Mage_Ctype:

Ironically, when you first mentioned fanboyism, I wasn't sure if you were going to defend the game or not cause many fanboys of the 1st game are the ones who really loathed the direction TLOU2 took. I'm curious what people who only played the 2nd felt.

I liked the game. Wasn't my favorite, but didn't hate it. I perfectly understand why people were upset with it for its flaws or story beats. I also understand why people enjoyed it or even loved it. I actually appreciated what they were trying to do with the story, although I felt delivery could've been better, specifically being more focused on the main themes and the parallels between Abby and Joel. Some parts seemed thrown in for drama (to me). so I somewhat agree with ham-fisted plot points though perhaps for different reasons. If the game made some tweaks, it could've been an all time favorite story for me....but key word is could've.

The established character thing is overblown imo, and makes me question what people really took from the 1st game, in particular the character development. In the 1st game, Joel was not the same static character between the prologue, Boston, and the climax. Joel couldn't bear to hold onto a picture of his daughter in the 1st game. In the 2nd, he has a picture framed in his room, which shouldn't feel like a strange betrayal of his character if anyone's played through the 1st game.

That all being said, everything in the story was perfectly explainable even if there were parts that didn't resonate with me as much as Naughty Dog was probably intending. Just like the 1st game, and in real life, the characters make mistakes or are driven by flaws at times. I'm not big on this Neil Druckman guy though...it felt like I could feel his ego during some of the plot reveals and the game seems to act like its deeper than it is but those are just the vibes I got. Also, couldn't really care at all about the Fireflies, but I'll still play ng+ on the hardest difficulty one day.

@Blk_Mage_Ctype: Just played through it, certainty flawed but the majority of "major" criticisms I saw repeated over and over before I played it are way blown out of proportion.

"...saying that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the game, that it deserved GOTY, and that anyone who disliked the game was just a minority hater."

This is a pretty standard strawman-esque argument. Obviously you can criticize whatever you want and the game is not perfect. It is completely possible to acknowledge flaws while also believing that the good completely outweighs the bad.

"Do you basically head canon your own version of the game in which characters don't behave in completely nonsensical ways which goes completely against their established personities or make zero sense to do given the present situation"

Ok, the whole "Joel is sooooo out of character" is probably the biggest harped on criticism that I found doesn't really hold up. Particularly, getting mad about him telling Abby's group his name- even though it doesn't matter that he does, because Abby already overheard his name when Tommy said it earlier. If you're gonna be mad at anything surrounding Joel's death, it should be the perfect storm of terrible luck that led him to that garage in the first place. As far as other characters, the only possible people that could be acting "out of character" are Ellie and Tommy because those are the only other main characters from the first game. I really didn't get any of that from those two characters personally, Ellie has always had the potential for violence and both characters are being influenced by grief.

"there aren't any needlessly gratuitous scenes of violence/sex which only exist for shock value"

I do somewhat agree with this one although I have to say the sheer amount of rage that one short sex scene caused is pretty hysterical. From the way people talked about it, I was expected something like full frontal nudity and 3+ unbroken minutes of just boning. And then I saw it, and was like ok, kind of awkward.... but that's it??? It was over so quickly and hardly even showed anything, complete overreaction. As far as violence, the final fight between Abby and Ellie did jump the shark pretty hard but other than that nothing particularly stands out.

"there aren't pointless progression-halting flashback sequences which only serve to punctuate the drama of certain ham-fisted plot points"

Completely subjective, I thought they did a fine job of providing the context for why the two playable characters behaved the way they did. Ellie in particular because she spent a good majority of the four years she had with Joel resenting him, and to have him taken from her right after they reconciled is a pretty decent plot point IMO.

"the fact that the game forces you to sit through long cutscenes consisting of clunky characters interactions in which everyone inexplicably acts like moody teenagers regardless of their age between otherwise short gameplay segments."

You are not forced to sit through anything when you can skip any cutscene. The dialogue itself and more importantly the performance that conveys it was fine, again a completely subjective take. There is no "My face is tired" moment to point to that I am aware of, also Ellie is literally a teenager and Abby like... 20? 21? I did not find the gameplay sections themselves to be short, some of them where fairly protracted. Of course if you don't like having narrative and action blended together you won't like this, but that same criticism applies the first game.

"which characters in a hostile environment decide that it's a good idea to smoke weed, make out, and strum out tunes on a guitar as if they're just kids camping out who aren't surrounded by threats in a post apocalyptic setting in which such activities are ill-advised and are liable to draw the attention of enemies?"

Another completely exaggerated "problem." Ellie and Dina are on a routine patrol in the basement of an abandoned safehouse near their town during a snowstorm. It is established through dialogue and found items that the area around Jackson is usually fairly low traffic from infected and a lot of patrols are just boring, and they do get briefly chewed out by Jesse when he finds them. Once again, they are literally horny teenagers who do not and frankly should not act like Navy Seals. Also, this same problem extends to the first game as well where Ellie, despite having lived through lots of dangerous and traumatic shit, does stupid things that puts her life in jeopardy.

I think this game was an overall weaker story that the first game but still pretty great. I think the overarching themes are sloppily done but the characters, immersive environments, and moment to moment banter compensate for that.

@Blk_Mage_Ctype: the only bad canon issues are from people who hate the game. Those people have a fundamental misunderstanding of who Joel was as a character and the motivations of each other character. And no one defends Abby killing while condemning Ellie. That's just false.

As for your weird complaints about their activities outside of combat, people try to find hope and joy in even the worst of situations. All of those things were done in places they thought or knew were safe.

I'm not sure how loud you think any of those activities are or why you seem to think they just did it all out in the open. These are all nit picking complaints. Very silly stuff.

Did you play it? Or did you just watch cut scenes? Your knowledge of the game seems incomplete.

@dvdjedi: Not as hilarious as the blind love it gets. Seriously, all you guys do is reduce the arguments down to those three baseless points and I cannot take you seriously because of it. You are being wilfully ignorant of any legitimate criticism, out of fear.

@dvdjedi: Yawn

@cboye18: First time?

@mooglestar: you sound like a nazi.

@mooglestar: I played through the entire game, had amazing graphics and gameplay and atmosphere, but lots of elements of the story should not have happened. Abby in particular was utterly useless and shouldn't have been in the game, let alone a focal point of the entire story. Ellie being gay with Dina I didn't mind, but it was pushed and shown a little too much.

@mooglestar: Riiiiiight...

@Oldgun: So you didn't play the game?

@ObligatoryFate: Ah yes, user reviews, the pinnacle of unbiased opinions. Modern Warfare 2019 is currently at a 3.2/10 on Metacritic because of thousands of 0/10 scores from angry Russians but hey at least the critics can't influence it! Or maybe... just maybe... aggregate user reviews are a garbage metric for anything "controversial" because the discussion becomes dominated by the most angry and unreasonable people who want to use said scores as a method of punishing something they don't like rather than actually reviewing it.

@ObligatoryFate: Meh, the real rating for me personally is in between. I looked at the reviews before and after finishing the game and never felt they were anything but exaggerated, both the positive and negative takes.

9/10? Maybe for some people but that's way too high imo for the majority of people. I would not call it a masterpiece like some professional game reviewers did.

Lower than 6/10 for almost any rubric is just laughable to me. There's a lot of truly mediocre games out there, TLOU2 isn't one of them even if it's plot is polarizing.

@ObligatoryFate: the user reviews are angry trolls who mostly didn't play it.

@ObligatoryFate: Nope. The game is amazing. For every person who jumped onto the hate bandwagon you'll find hundreds who actually played and enjoyed the game.