The Last of Us II - Update to add lots of stuff, inc. Grounded mode, perma death and gameplayer modifiers. And cheats!

Zilnad wrote:You don't have to answer as this is an extremely personal question but have you ever experienced a real addiction?

Of course we, as the players, can clearly see that the characters are on the wrong path and that their thirsts for revenge are destroying their psyches and damning everyone around them. But the characters themselves are blind to that. Even if they understand it's the case, they can't acknowledge it to themselves. Ellie is addicted to revenge.

Can't you understand it from that perspective? To essentially say that Ellie and Abbie should just snap out of it is completely missing the point and incredibly naive.

Also, have you played Spec Ops recently? I have and, although it's still decent, it really hasn't aged all that well from both story and gameplay perspectives.

OrangeRKN wrote:Ellie is clearly a violent person but I don't think addiction to violence or bloodlust is her driving motivation. We don't really see her take pleasure in violence, only be hardened against it. It's more a recurring trauma and grief over Joel's death that manifests as anger and a desire for revenge. Back on the farm we see her still suffering from essentially PTSD and her mistaken belief is obviously that killing Abby will set things right and bring her peace. I don't think that's an addiction per se, rather her trauma preventing her from moving beyond the anger stage of her grief.

It's been mentioned that the characters in the game are all incapable of learning or seeing the bigger picture on the futility of revenge, but is that true of anyone other than Ellie? Dina becomes a passive element in the story, while Jessie is obviously much more concerned with getting everyone home safe (and that comes to a head over the choice to pursue Abby or save Tommy). Tommy is interesting because he doesn't have a character arc himself - but the player's perspective on him changes throughout the game. His desire for revenge goes untempered throughout, but it's increasingly obvious he is a cold killer without remorse (through both his casually discovered torture and the literal methodical distance of the sniper rifle as a weapon). While he grieves his brother he doesn't appear traumatised as Ellie is, but instead committed out of a sense of justice and vengeance. I don't think thoughts on the futility of revenge would ever particularly concern him.

With Abby, she starts the game seeking revenge but that is not her driver for the majority of it. When she is drawn to it a second time, Lev persuades her out of it - and that's despite the recency of Ellie and Tommy killing all of her friends. Unlike Ellie, Abby does change a lot over the course of three days.

It's only Ellie then who is so stubbornly incapable of learning, and the tragedy is that when she finally does it is too late (whereas if the game had ended at the end of the days in Seattle, it would not have been tragic).

Tafdolphin wrote:And it's strange that you say her snapping out of it is naive as...that's literally what happens in the end.

Tafdolphin wrote:Me and Banjo were discussing this last night and decided a much better version of the game would have you playing as Abby from the start, basically that her half comes first. The sniper scene plays out as normal but then...holy gooseberry fool is that Tommy? And there's a girl with him? Flashback to Abby killing Joel and the rest of the game is spent avoiding/hunting Ellie.

OrangeRKN wrote:

A culmination of factors cause that final "snapping out of it", because together they deny Ellie any of the carthasis or expectations she had over how killing Abby would bring her peace. The fact Abby is already dying when Ellie finds her takes away her agency. Abby being so weakened contradicts Ellie's preferred view of her as the monstrous villain that killed Joel. Abby refuses repeatedly to fight, not giving Ellie the clear-cut showdown she wanted (her cutting Abby down and not just killing her on the post is evidence of that). Lev is there and in need of Abby's help, again contradicting the preferred view of her as the villain. Even with all that, it takes Ellie actually going through the motions, beating Abby and being at the point of killing her, to understand there will be no release. It doesn't seem undeserved as the point at which Ellie finally has that realisation, even coming after everything else. Everything else Ellie has done she can dismiss in part thinking that getting to Abby will finally make things different.

Tafdolphin wrote:Me and Banjo were discussing this last night and decided a much better version of the game would have you playing as Abby from the start, basically that her half comes first. The sniper scene plays out as normal but then...holy gooseberry fool is that Tommy? And there's a girl with him? Flashback to Abby killing Joel and the rest of the game is spent avoiding/hunting Ellie.

The sniper section is my favourite part of the whole game. Partly in how it plays out moment-to-moment which itself is very cool and unique, and partly for how it is set up - which relies on Ellie's half coming first.

The game uses flashbacks as mechanical tutorials, for example in the introduction of swimming. When a flashback has Tommy teaching Ellie to shoot with the sniper rifle, it's a tutorial for sniping and introduces mechanics such as bullet drop and drawing infected enemies out with the sound/impact of the bullet. Yet it also perfectly foreshadows that section as Abby up against Tommy sniping. His prowess with the weapon has been demonstrated, and moreover he uses the same mechanics but against the player and you're made to deal with them from the opposite perspective as he deliberately draws out infected to attack you. The section is also foreshadowed and built to through both Ellie and Abby's halves by radio conversations and the like, and most notably by the point where Ellie and Jessie split off - again though this is also there for another reason (Ellie prioritising revenge against Abby over saving Tommy) and so it being foreshadowing of the sniping section itself is subtly and effectively done. It feels the cleverest part of the game to me because of all of that, as well as just being a very tense and fun section to play.

Tafdolphin wrote:...ok?

What was the diary entry you were alluding to earlier? I never saw it

jiggles wrote:Revisited the epilogue to do something I forgot to do and it has contextualised the game in a whole different way.

Examining Ellie’s notebook and she’s writing a final song about contemplating whether she should have stayed with Dina. One particular line stood out where she describes her life as not hers to give.

The game isn’t even a revenge story! It’s a story about obligation.

The WLF are obligated to bring Joel to justice for dooming the planet. The violent nature with which that justice is applied is Abby’s vengeance for her father but that is ultimately pretty inconsequential.

We first think Ellie is on a quest for bloody revenge due to the WLF killing someone she loved. However, with the time it’s taken her and Dina to make the trip to Seattle, that pain shouldn’t be so raw as to fuel her aggression as much as it seems to have done. We’re shown the museum flashback and wait, it wasn’t just someone she loved, it was effectively her father.

Later, we find out that, no, actually, Joel died with Ellie hating him. Her vengeance is driven by having the closure on their relationship robbed of her.

But then, they actually had that closure on the night of Ellie’s kiss with Dina. The love she had for him is still gone, but she owed it to him to not hate him for what he did. So why couldn’t Ellie just quit while she was ahead in the game’s final act?

She owed it to Joel. Her life was his. She wasn’t fuelled by anger anymore, but by duty. Abby had to die by, effectively, Joel’s posthumous self-defence. It wasn’t that Joel’s death was haunting Ellie, it’s that Ellie’s *life* was haunting her. Every moment she lived without fulfilling her duty to Joel was a moment unearned.

That’s why she was still driven to complete the task after weeks (months?) on the road for the wounds to heal, and why her approach in Seattle is so workmanlike. She doesn’t want to do this, she has to. She just wants it over with so she can move on, her obligation fulfilled.

The line from the first trailer “I’m gonna find... and I’m gonna kill... every last one of them” doesn’t actually exist in the game, if I was paying attention. Because with all the misdirection the marketing did, making it out to be a tale of revenge was just a part of that.

Fade wrote:@Denster

I think people forget this world doesn't have police.

Joel didn't just kill Abby's Dad, he killed a ton of Fireflies and staff in the hospital as well as destroying any hope of a cure.

I don't think Abby's response is unjustified at all, this man literally destroyed her life and the lives of everyone around her, and without her actions he'd be free to potentially do this again in the future.

Tafdolphin wrote:I love that section, which is why I think it would work so much better in the way I described. My one problem I had was it was that, not for the first time, I wasn't sure if the game knew I knew it was Tommy from the start. Like, the reveal of Tommy at the end is certainly framed like a reveal, but it...isn't? There are 3 people referred to as Trespassers in the game: Ellie, Tommy and Jesse. We know where two of them are, and that only one of them, Tommy, is a sniper. So we know from the start that this is a running fight against Tommy. But then we get to the grappling scene and...yeah it's framed as a reveal. It's very odd.

And TLoU2 is Chekov's Gun: The Game. Any little detail mentioned slightly off-handedly comes back later, to the point where I was able to start charting the course of the game through its pithy 'asides'. Ellie's love of astronomy? Probably something to do with a rocket museum coming up. Abby's fear of heights? Probably going up high (I imagined there'd be a mission up the Space Needle). Zev and Yara's mum gets a mention? That's why Abby went to the island etc etc Everything it does narratively it pushes too far and too hard. It's incredibly unsubtle with everything it does.

Tafdolphin wrote:

Zilnad wrote:You don't have to answer as this is an extremely personal question but have you ever experienced a real addiction?

Of course we, as the players, can clearly see that the characters are on the wrong path and that their thirsts for revenge are destroying their psyches and damning everyone around them. But the characters themselves are blind to that. Even if they understand it's the case, they can't acknowledge it to themselves. Ellie is addicted to revenge.

Can't you understand it from that perspective? To essentially say that Ellie and Abbie should just snap out of it is completely missing the point and incredibly naive.

Also, have you played Spec Ops recently? I have and, although it's still decent, it really hasn't aged all that well from both story and gameplay perspectives.

I think revenge is treated less like a virus and more analogous to cordyceps, something rotting her brain and taking over her actions. Which is fine and dandy, if that's what they intended it's a clever twist on the genre of body snatching diseases. But 1) that's an interpretation and isn't laid bare in the text of the game and 2) there's still the disconnect there. The world Ellie moves through is designed to showcase the fact that she is wrong. Dina tells her she's wrong, the NPC dialogue tells her she's wrong, Ellie's history tells her she's wrong. But she never learns nor even attempts to. Even if it's a great idea, it still makes for a frustrating game that never really goes anywhere with its message.

And it's strange that you say her snapping out of it is naive as...that's literally what happens in the end.

Me and Banjo were discussing this last night and decided a much better version of the game would have you playing as Abby from the start, basically that her half comes first. The sniper scene plays out as normal but then...holy gooseberry fool is that Tommy? And there's a girl with him? Flashback to Abby killing Joel and the rest of the game is spent avoiding/hunting Ellie. Imagine how much better that would've worked: you've got the perspective shift the game prides itself on, a better twist, and the same discomfort about your actions as you're hunting the character you knew and loved from the first game! All without the needless suffering and cruelty that marks Ellie's chapters. Listening to the Vice Games/Waypoint spoilercast this morning and they came up with exactly the same idea (and actually a better one: if it was Tommy leading the revenge quest with Ellie as an unwilling partner forced by her survivor's guilt to participate and using her inherent empathy to slowly 'infect' the others with her understanding).

Wedgie wrote:Don’t forget that the fireflies didn’t give Ellie a choice. They are willing to kill her for a cure that have no 100% sure guarantee of success without her being given the choice. Joel in my eyes was right to save her.

Tomous wrote:

Wedgie wrote:Don’t forget that the fireflies didn’t give Ellie a choice. They are willing to kill her for a cure that have no 100% sure guarantee of success without her being given the choice. Joel in my eyes was right to save her.

Weren't there notes lying about that suggested they'd already done this many times without success

Wedgie wrote:

Tomous wrote:

Wedgie wrote:Don’t forget that the fireflies didn’t give Ellie a choice. They are willing to kill her for a cure that have no 100% sure guarantee of success without her being given the choice. Joel in my eyes was right to save her.

Weren't there notes lying about that suggested they'd already done this many times without success

Yes there are. But Ellie is the first case of being immune to the virus to fall in their laps.