Ellie has had time to both find herself in the Jackson, Wyoming settlement she and her flawed father figure Joel call home and to reflect on the formative moments of her childhood. This dance between interactivity and an unalterable story made for a much more affecting experience than if I’d watched it all unfold in a movie.Preorder The Last of Us Part 2 I Am Not Alone, Dear LonelinessĪt the heart of it all is Ellie and her relationships. I was asked to execute those actions or watch them happen without a chance to intercede, and to understand the reasoning behind them from their perspective. Even if I disagreed with an action, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Part 2 is peppered with brutal, tragic, and poignant moments that hit harder because you take part in them, like it or not. Naughty Dog’s characters are indelible, which makes for incredibly powerful and challenging moments when you’re put in Ellie's shoes and asked to act out her whims yourself. In a medium often defined by giving us the power to choose what happens, The Last of Us and Part 2 concern themselves more with fully realized characters, asking us to take them as they are. One of the most impactful ways Part 2 hearkens back to The Last of Us is how it asks you to identify and empathize with its characters, even when you almost certainly won’t always agree with their actions. The Last of Us Part 2’s story is handled as masterfully as it was in the original.
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Part 2 deftly handles a war on the streets of post-zombie-apocalypse Seattle, an expansive new cast of characters, and some gut-punch payoffs to the lingering emotions The Last of Us’ powerful ending left me stirring over for the last seven years. Ellie’s journey grows into something much more ambitious.įrom there, Ellie’s journey grows into something much more ambitious. But those cliches are often subverted, playing into the expansive and not-so-straightforward path ahead. It knowingly leans into the tropes of the genre, such as guilt by association and the inevitable escalation of matching an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It starts out seemingly simple, taking place about four years after the end of the original and setting an older, angrier, but still-immune Ellie on a quest for revenge that also hones in on the cycles of violence that can plague humanity as much as any infection. One of Part 2’s biggest achievements is how it knowingly handles the weighted expectations that a sequel to one of the most heralded game stories of all time will inevitably carry with fans. But doing so would strip away layers of the act of playing through Part 2 yourself, so I’ll speak about its story in largely general terms. I can’t tell you much about some of Part 2’s best aspects, but not because I don’t want to – I’m bursting to talk with anyone about all the moving, uplifting, and heart-wrenching moments that have been replaying in my mind for days since I first beat this adventure. But with The Last of Us Part 2, developer Naughty Dog rises to that challenge with not only a complex, profound story that gives it a reason to exist, but also deep and satisfying evolutions to the original’s third-person action/stealth gameplay. Its story is largely poignant because of how self-contained it is: not knowing what happened between Joel and Ellie after his fateful, final decision burned a mark into the brains of many who played it, and that open-ended question has lingered for years.
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Its scope and scale won’t challenge Rockstar’s open-world games any time soon, but it shakes up the pacing in a needed way.The Last of Us is one of the rare beloved games of the past decade that not only didn’t demand a sequel, but actively seemed to resist the idea of one.