Be Excellent To Each Other

Christ. Now I know what hearthly bats off to it all makes sense.

I cheerfully described aspects of Death Stranding as 'hokum' in its thread, so I'm not blind to its flaws, of which there are many. (Other things I flagged up were the overly extended Heartman mountain section, pointless inventory complications with multiple grades of the same things, vehicle behaviour in certain environments and so on.)

Death Stranding gets more latitude because it made such an incredible effort to be something fundamentally new and different, IMO it genuinely redefined what it can feel like to play a videogame, whilst telling a compelling, if somewhat batshit crazy story that had huge ideas and astonishing ambition. (An ambition that, overall, I felt it did enough to realise.)

TLOU2's basic story is as old as time, I mean, Wuthering Heights was doing it in 1847, so if TLOU2 wants to tell the same story again it needs to do a damn good job of it, especially if it's going to drag it out over 25-30 hours.

And I don't think it does a particularly impressive job of it, and it definitely goes on far too long, and it hangs all of this onto the framework of a videogame that has workmanlike mechanics that aren't a million miles removed from the previous game (released in 2013), and even then they weren't exactly revolutionary.

Love the way her eyes basically don't move at all in that scene - gives it a real uncanny valley feel

You must be entirely oblivious to the fact that these complaints can levelled entirely at Deaths Stranding.

I thought the heels would be an encumbrance in the water. But they just skim over the top of it. Magic stuff.

Yes but like I said a few posts back, Death Stranding gets extra latitude because it's trying to do, and be, so much more than TLOU2.

TLOU2 is a decent enough videogame that'll keep me playing to the end, but it hasn't captivated me like Death Stranding did.

I dunno, maybe I'm just not the target audience for TLOU2, or maybe a videogame is the wrong medium for what it's trying to do, it's the sort of story that could be better told in a two hour film, I think.



It's a bit like the disconnect between the entertaining mayhem of GTAIV, and then the sombre and shocking backstory of Niko and the emotional damage his past inflicted upon him.

I can't help but think that there's a much braver, more honest game that could be made about this sort of stuff, but they gotta put all the explosions and killing in there to make the game fun.....

Well actually, such a game already exists of course, Spec Ops: The Line.

Or you could accept that your opinion has been coloured, tainted and influenced by all the YouTube videos, interviews, reviews and online comments you’ve read, watched and consumed before experiencing the game for yourself.

To me, TLOU2 is best compared to Resident Evil 4, another 20+ hour game survival horror game. It does everything the other games did but now looks amazing and improves the mechanics. You’re enjoying the game and thinking you’re about done and then BAAM you’ve got to put the second disc in and now you’re on another island and have many more hours to play. The island’s great of course and has much more action but it’s missing some of the character of the start of the game because you’ve already spent more time there and you spent it there first. But when you settle in, you’ve got tons more enjoyment on offer and then you’ve got a big boss to fire rockets at. The perfect analogy.

Err on the side of caution when posting things that can be considered spoilers, folks. Not everyone wants to ruin the game for themselves before they play it

Err on the side of caution when posting things that can be considered spoilers, folks. Not everyone wants to ruin the game for themselves before they play it

Here's a non-spoiler, and a good thing about TLOU2.

https://twitter.com/BlondeHistorian/sta ... 5805222919

I’ve just finished #TheLastofUsPartII 😭

Thank you @Naughty_Dog for empowering me to play a video game as a visually impaired player & feel totally included.

This game has set the standard! If you’re a #GameDev please look at the low vision settings so I can play your game too.

— Dr Amy Kavanagh👩🏼‍🦯 (@BlondeHistorian) July 2, 2020

Sorry I didn't consider the bits you've spoilered out as spoilers when I wrote them, (I have been using spoiler tags frequently in this thread), but reading them back they do give away some thematic stuff and whatnot that folks might not want to know upfront, apologies and I will be more careful going forward.

The game is absolutely peerless in that regard and Naughty Dog deserve all the credit they're getting in regard of options when it comes to controls, difficulty and particularly accessibility.

This is the first game I can think of that is so incredibly configurable that I'd honestly feel completely comfortable recommending it to someone who was nervous in any or all of the above regards, as every single aspect of the game can be tweaked to make it playable.

All done, game completed, linear runtime just shy of 30 hours according to the save file, but a lot more than that overall due to my propensity for going back and trying bits again.

I watched every cutscene, read every note I found, read every single one of Ellie's journal entries, experienced as much of the game as I possibly good.

NON-SPOILER THOUGHTS.

It's a good videogame. If you buy it purely on the premise of wanting to enjoy a very well made videogame, with peerless production values, solid game mechanics, astonishing visuals, some incredible showpiece and setpiece moments, fantastic voice and mocap work, a handful of thrilling boss fights, and more than its fair share of ZOMG moments - TLOU2 has you covered.

Drop the cash on it purely on that basis, I promise you won't be disappointed.

It definitely runs too long, even taken purely as a videogame and discounting the story (I'll get to that in the spoiler bit), there's a good 5-10 hours of fat on this thing that could have been trimmed to make a better experience. (This is not a controversial opinion, you'd be hard pushed to find even a positive review that doesn't think this game has pacing and bloat issues.)

The story is....... meh. I'll do that in the spoiler bit.

I can't bring myself to go more than 7.5/10 for this one, as a single player narrative driven game, it's just not worth it, and the story drags this one down, as such the final mark for TLOU2 is:

750/1000

EDIT - Oh god and the narrative structure they went for, so many really solid suggestions out there as to how the story could have been better told from a timeline and character perspective.

EDIT 2 - And I use a proper score scale, so 500/1000 would be 'average', as such I'm rating TLOU2 as well above average.

A couple of well rounded reviews of the game that also come in around the 7/10 mark, I honestly think 7-ish out of 10 is about right for this game overall.

It ain't a 10, but it ain't a 5 either.





Or Zero Punctuation gets it done in 6m10s



This one was quite good too:

When are you doing your RDR2 review?

I may actually give RDR2 a go.

This is a good one. His ideas for fixing the story in a single game are great, but particularly the suggestion that TLOU2 should have been split out into TLOU2 and TLOU3. (Which at a stroke also fixes the problem with TLOU2 being far too long.)

As he also says, pacing is totally whacked in this game, as is the chronology of the story as it's told.

IMO this is yet another measured, balanced review of the game and its flaws, whilst also acknowledged the (many!) things it excels at.

Note the first 1m45s are him plugging his sponsor so best to skip that.

“Too long” and should have been “TLOU2 & 3” is such a daft criticism. The whole story they wanted to tell us is right here right now and thank fuck they didn’t try and milk it by splitting the story up. I appreciate the consumer friendly approach. There’s always problems with splitting your story up (see Hunger Games, Potter etc) but with video games they’d probably be more inclined to start adding mechanics to prevent 3 being a rehash of 2’s mechanics and people moaning it’s too much like 2 waah waah etc. Resi 4 is a masterpiece at 20+ hours for the first play through and I’d have been fucking annoyed if it ended on a cliffhanger before Nintendo sold me the second disc 12 months later.

It’s a brilliant game as it is and a magnificent achievement. I couldn’t give a flying fuck that it’s not the story some small moaning YouTube shits wanted - it’s the story Druckmann wanted to tell and he saw it through from start to finish without compromise.

You’re in the minority here and looking to reenforce an opinion you’d formed before you even played the game by looking at “reviews” that say the same things you’d already read.

Is there a school somewhere for people who want to be famous on YouTube where they tell them all to talk with their hands? It looks so fucking idiotic and forced.

How can a criticism be 'daft' if it's an opinion that someone genuinely holds and gives a rational explanation for?

TLOU2 drags in my honest opinion, there were moments in the campaign:



where I was honestly getting bored and just wanting the actual story to progress. It is a simple statement of fact that there are chunks of this game where neither the story or the characters change or progress in any way whatsoever, I was reminded of an episode of Luke Cage (Season 1) where the credits rolled on an episode and I was like, 'Dafuq, literally nothing happened! The plot synopsis for this episode could be left blank and no one would miss anything.'

The gameplay loop is solid but it's not spectacular, and at times it's stretched too thin. On at least two occasions I got to the point where I just cheesed the encounter, dashing forward through a route that seemed to allow me to escape relatively unmolested, just to trigger the next checkpoint.

As a one player narrative driven game I think the pacing is badly off, the ordering of it from a chronological perspective hurts the actual story, and I know exactly what Druckmann was going for because I've taken the time to read and watch multiple interviews with him about it. They've made some bold choices, no doubt about it, but for the story it is, IMO there's a better way to tell it, and a leaner, more coherent way to tell it.

I don't know why there's such obvious anger creeping into your post, why try to belittle people by calling them 'small moaning YouTube shits' just because they have a different opinion to you about a videogame?

Lord, couldn’t agree more about Luke Cage but TV and video games are different mediums. Being bored of the game and wanting to progress the story so you can play more game is an odd observation, mind. But having a “great idea” - two games! is daft for a singular vision. Splitting the narrative across multiple games wouldn’t work for TLOU2 and it’s not consumer friendly either. If you’ve had enough of playing the game because it’s long then, I’ve a “great idea”, just put it down for a bit. No one is forcing anyone to continue. Wouldn’t it be great if Death Stranding split its narrative across two games with years between each release? That’s a 50 hour+ game so it’s clearly too long. No, obviously not. Stop moaning about more game. If you don’t want more game then you’ve got the choice to stop or come back later.

Plus, we’ve all cheesed encounters to get to the next bit in literally every game ever. I’m sure I cheesed some encounters too where it become a slog to repeat the same difficult sections (mind you, I was playing on survivor). I’d rather have an out for a difficult situation than being hindered in my ability to progress.

Hey look, just because it’s on YouTube doesn’t mean it’s gospel. No way I’m going to sit through 4 more videos of people endlessly waffling on about TLOU2. I’m certainly going to take ZP with a pinch of salt. YouTubers aren’t all created equal, they’re not journalists and don’t all have insightful opinions. Look at Angry Joe, his video of the first big twist is disgusting and pathetic. This guy used to work for the Nostalgia Critic and look at the complaints about sexism in that camp.

FWIW I completely agree about the Angry Joe review, it was embarrassing to watch a grown man throw a genuine shouty strop because he didn't get the game or the story he wanted, all that:



nonsense and leaving the room at one point too.

I generally enjoy his content but he was way off beam on that one.

The guy to watch in their videos IMO is Alex, he's far more measured and seems to think his way around stuff in a much more mature fashion. The Angry Joe extended spoiler discussion of TLOU2 is substantially better than the main review, and Alex's comments in particular are fairly insightful, and he gives Druckmann due credit for making some bold choices.

Well yes that's what I did, hence it took me two weeks to complete it. I've said all along the game is good enough to deserve seeing out to the end, and as I said in my review above, when the game is spectacular, it really is spectacular.

'I think the game is too long for reasons x, y and z' and 'I want to finish the game' can both be true at the same time.

As for splitting it out into two games, the way that chap suggested it works well to my mind, and the idea would be they'd be released fairly close together, not years apart. The other option would be to simply do the 'two games' as one game with the same 25 hour runtime, it'd still make the story work better when structured in that regard IMO.

One of TLOU2's biggest problems is that its inciting incident feels stunningly contrived and forced, it makes the characters do things that don't make sense so the story can happen, and then spends its runtime trying to fix a problem that it created in the first place.

I fully understand that this is the story Druckmann wanted to tell, and this is the way he wanted to tell it, and I respect that, I knew what I was getting into when I bought the game, and at the end of it all I gave the game a lot of praise for what I like about it.

That said, the way I feel about it is the way I feel about it, and I've tried to explain why that is.

The closing stages of TLOU1 were stunningly haunting and oppressive, the game had worked to that point so masterfully that even as I was controlling Joel through the horrendous massacre he undertakes at the end, then the cold-blooded murder of both the surgeon (which you control) and Marlene (which you do not), I understood it, I understood his actions, and then the final, crushing lie that he has to deliver to Ellie, and the look on her face as she 'accepts' the lie with the word 'OK' but her face says she knows she is being lied to, cut to black, music plays - it's hands down one of the best endings in the history of videogames.

TLOU2 had glimmers of that power from time to time, but it failed for me as a story because there was so much I simply didn't accept on the basic level of 'The characters wouldn't be doing this' or 'The characters wouldn't be in this place'. To a greater or lesser extent, in the main, I didn't buy their motivations, and for that reason it was hard to feel emotionally invested in what was going on.



Add in the jumbled chronology of the narrative that I've made multiple references to already and, gah - you know what the most frustrating thing about this game is? They had the ingredients to make something incredible, and they fluffed it on the construction of the narrative. Even the story as is would have been fine if it'd been told in a different order and had some of the filler taken out.

TL:DR version, TLOU1 stayed with me in a way that TLOU2 absolutely will not, when the credits rolled on TLOU1 I sat there in awe, when the credits rolled on TLOU2 I was kind of like, 'Well at least that's over with now'.

I have now watched all of this video (yes all two hours plus of it), the chap makes a strong case and explains his reasoning in a clear and compelling fashion.

TBH there's not a huge amount I disagree with, and in fairness many of the criticisms he's addressing are criticisms I haven't made - (but rather criticisms made by the wider 'community') - and indeed explicitly stated are aspects of the game I have no problem with, or indeed even like.



In fact, if you bring it down to absolute brass tacks the only major element of the game we have a fundamental difference of opinion about is the point at which:



It's a good video and justifies its runtime, and I enjoyed listening to his point of view, even if I didn't agree with everything he said.

I don't see how it's possible that anyone can have complaints about a game overstaying its welcome but still be willing to watch a two hour video on the subject.

At a rough estimate I've watched about 25-30 hours of TLOU2 reviews and analysis.

But that's not overly unusual for me, I often find the analysis of something far more interesting than the thing itself.

Like, I haven't even watched any of the new Stars Wars films but I've watched tens of hours of videos about them.

Longer than the game

Yes, I'm fully aware of that.

Excellent video from the always entertaining NakeyJakey.

Deconstructs the problems with The Last Of Us 2 very effectively (whilst not hating on it), and also discusses problems with Naughty Dog's game design in general, including the Ludonarrative Dissonance that affects the Uncharted games which I described in the Uncharted 4 thread without knowing the correct term for it. (Uncharted 4, as an aside, I got bored with around 2/3 of the way through and stopped playing.)

Do note that his problems with The Last Of Us 2 have nothing whatsoever to do with THEY KILLED MY HERO JOEL, or SJW AGENDA PUSHERS or any of that shite.

Somewhat entertainingly, the 'remaster' of this has just been released on PS5 (because three and a half years is enough time to need a remaster), although in fairness if you already own it then the PS5 remaster is only a tenner.

I'm genuinely conflicted as to whether or not I have a replay of this game in me, on the one hand I'd quite like to return to the amazing world Naughty Dog created, in gorgeous 60FPS PS5-o-vision, but on the other hand I remember everything that was wrong with it and I didn't like.

For a tenner I guess I could give it a punt, not the end of the world if I decide to bail out.