WARNING : STOP SCROLLING IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS!
With that out of the way, lets talk Part II.
Few months before the release a leaked video was posted online and of course I avoided it and didn’t know what was but the reaction to the video was very negative some fans outright saying they will not bother with the game and all of that because Joel dies in the beginning of the game. what I don’t understand is why is that such a major deal? especially if you know why did Joel actually die and the reason behind it, to that you will need to go back and rematch the hospital scene from the first game, Remember this guy:
Joel murdered this guy to “Save” Ellie at the end of the first game, it was a morally polarizing choice that he made and that choice defined human race’s future, by killing the doctor and the staff he killed all chances for a vaccine, Joel’s choice was the emotional one but it wasn’t the right one and even Ellie understood that and the game thoroughly navigates that dynamic between Joel and Ellie through the flashback scenes. so why when the daughter of that surgeon who spends her whole life looking for Joel and finally finds him and brutally murders him is a bad thing to the fans of the game? as far as Abby is concerned he is the villain of her story regardless of his feelings toward Ellie, People keep calling Abby the villain of Part II and that is in my opinion a flat-out misunderstanding of what Abby’s character represented.
So what is the real issue? well to me the issue is what the game tried to do with the 2nd half of the game, you can easily think of this game as a two full games by the way, Abby’s campaign is for the most part separate from Ellie’s and while they both lead to the same location at the end their paths and events are not very connected which in the end it feels like Abby’s campaign was unnecessary or filler, yes it gave so much depth to her character and by the end I grew to like Abby and felt like under difference circumstances she would have loved to have Ellie as a friend but those could have been achieved with an hour long cut scenes instead of a 10-Hour long campaign, but to be honest it is very interesting in its own right especially how well the whole Seraphites (Scars) area was very interesting to explore and how well their culture was developed and honestly if Last of Us Part II was just Abby’s campaign and it had nothing to do with Joel and Ellie I think that would have been fine too, it is just too much the way it is and that to me is the issue, which by the way it didn’t bother me much and I still really enjoyed the game and for someone who really love long games this is a very weird position for me to be in.
But here is the thing, the issue that I mentioned basically is a problem for people who are at least 15 hours into the game so how come the moment the reviews went up on Metacritic people started bombing the site with 0 out of 10s? well it is simple because in this game Ellie is gay and the character that I showed above is Transgender, which apparently is a major issue for some people, that is why I don’t take any of the user reviews seriously (to be honest no one should ever take user reviews seriously) because this is an Anti-LGBT campaign, even though those character’s sexuality and orientation barely play any part into the story it is there but it is not the center of it at all, they are just bigot sandwichs.
Going Nuclear : A Blog. 