It is with great disappointment and pain that I rate this game as it is. The Last of Us 1 is one of my favourite video games of all time. Its storytelling and characters are still unrivaled to this day. But The Last of Us 2 falls short of almost everything that made the original great.
I will mainly address what most gamers pick up TLOU2 for: its story and characters. Firstly the story. The central theme of the game is revenge, or rather the futility of it. It is a good theme to explore and it does tie nicely to how the first game ended. The way that the story is told, the rationale for certain events and the overall story are, for the most part, good. They are grounded and believable, and you can relate to them. The story is also handled very maturely. While some people have said that it feels pointless, I personally understand why the story had to end the way it did. The narrative is paced out quite nicely, except for some parts which can feel a little drawn out. Overall, I would say the story deserves an 8/10.
So why am I giving the game a 5/10? Because of the characters. They are undoubtedly some of the worst that I have seen in a narrative driven game. They are so flawed in the executions that they actually undo whatever good that the story does.
The characters in this game has almost no identifiable traits. The story opens with Ellie being cold and distant towards Joel, and it is never explained why (for people who have played the game, this scene takes place before Ellie found out what Joel did). During flashback sequences where Ellie is with Joel, that’s when the characters shine the most. You can feel the bond between them, just like it was in the first game. But when Ellie is by herself, she shows almost no emotion. You just cannot relate to her. You can try to rationalize it from the events in the game, but if you have to do that then the characterization has already failed. You cannot relate to her motivation, even when it is spelled out for you. The rest of the characters have even less motivation to do anything. Dina, Ellie’s lover, is shown to be a mere acquaintance, who flirted with Ellie and kissed her during a party. A few days later, Dina “ran away” with Ellie, telling her “Where you go, I go”. The same for Jesse. He has a couple of exchanges with Ellie at the start of the game, which indicated that they have no close bonds. Yet he turns up halfway through the game, proclaiming that he couldn’t let Ellie risk her life on her own. The game throws these characters at you and basically tell you that you have to like them, without giving you any reason.
Let’s talk about character traits. Dina, Jesse, Abby, Abby’s friends, the people that Abby met… What do they like? What do they dislike? What are their traits? How do they react in a given situation? These characters are cardboard cutouts with names and no identifiable traits. Take a look at Tess, or Henry, or David, or Bill, or Marlene in the original TLOU. Those characters are fleshed out in the first minute that they appear on screen. Tess, in her opening scene, showed exactly what kind of person she is. Tough, pragmatic and not one to take things lying down. After 4-5 hours with Dina, I have no idea who she is as a character. She doesn’t get angry, or sad, or happy, or anything. The only thing that I remember is that she would like to have a farm. The same for Jesse. Or any of Abby’s friends. You could change their name and 3D model and the narrative would not be affected one bit. Abby and Ellie, the main characters, are fleshed out just a little more but that’s not saying much. Aside from their obvious and in-your-face anger because of the main story arc, there are no nuance to them. They are at best one dimensional characters.
To make things worse, there is an overemphasis on LGBT themes and traits. That in itself is not wrong but it is just too much on the nose. It gets jarring with the settings and the overall narrative without even adding anything to the story. You have a somber story about loss and revenge, set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic world, and somehow, LGBT rights and representation has to be shoehorned in. Let’s compare it to my favourite LGBT character of all time, Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black (played by real life transgendered actress Laverne Cox). Her existence in the series wasn’t for diversity sake. It was to tell her story, her struggle as a father her son, her struggle as a transgender person in prison. But her being transgender wasn’t her character trait. It was her sassiness, her flaws, her love for her son.
And so, all this adds up to an overall story where events unfold and you cannot care less about how they affect the characters because you cannot relate to them at all. I didn’t care that the events were shocking or dangerous. I didn’t care which character lived or died. And that’s the problem with TLOU2.