Post-Game Game Post: The Last of Us, Part II

Around the halfway point of a tour through Bioshock Infinite, 2013’s Murder on the Skyway Express, the main characters find an acoustic guitar that’s survived the chaos and hell of the dystopic sky city Columbia. It’s a fleeting moment of beauty: Elizabeth and Booker pluck out a shortened duet of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” before returning the guitar and going on to murder four hundred thousand more revolutionaries and soldiers alike. Apart from being a tonal outlier, the Guitar Scene always just felt like a chance for the story to say, “hey, Booker’s not so bad! Look, he knows how to play an instrument!” It’s comfort in an attempt to excuse the horror of the rest of that world.

The Last of Us, Part II attempts to find these moments of beauty and comfort, time and time again, but as it drags on, it feels like it’s given up. By the end, it’s admitted that the beauty isn’t as engaging as the suffering, that this broken world exists only to put more and more characters through the ringer.

Set five years after Joel Miller and Ellie (last name unknown, seriously, I looked) move cross-country in the escort mission of the century, the two have found their place in the fortified community of Jackson, Wyoming. You see the lives they’ve built up, with scores of people surrounding them and glimpses at the interpersonal conflicts synonymous with post-apocalyptic life. There’s a bar, schools, and the faculties of something approximating “normal” life. Flashbacks show moments of tenderness and the father/daughter dynamic Ellie and Joel built up over their time there, the latter offering to teach Ellie guitar as time goes on. One of these flashbacks likely constitutes the best moment in the whole story, one I don’t dare spoil, but it’s the moment I knew its hooks were in me.

Their stint in this west coast idyll, of course, cannot last. The beauty gives way to suffering.

Tragedy pushes Ellie into a reckless, single-minded pursuit for vengeance, taking her and her newfound paramour Dina from the windswept fields of Jackson to the rainslick, husked metropolis of Seattle. It’s there that they’ll spend most of their time, and where the dynamic of their budding relationship is really allowed to shine. The interactions between Ellie and Dina are believable, subtle, and wide-ranging in their emotional impact. Their journey is as much the driving force through the story as the killing spree, but their dynamic feels so much more genuine and purposeful. You see playfulness, the sarcasm inherent in conversations between comfortable people, and the tension that forms when a schism - temporary or permanent - rises up between them. I found myself rooting for them to figure things out, celebrating when they did, and feeling genuine remorse when one of them would make decisions that hurt the other.

Mechanically, TLOUP2 is the best release Naughty Dog has put out to date. At its heart, it’s a stealth experience through-and-through, with each new chamber offering up just enough enemies to work your way through. It’s maybe a little troubling that, in a story where the central thematic conceit is, “revenge is bad, and violence only leads to more violence in a vicious circle,” killing dudes in this feels extremely satisfying. You’ll throw bricks to distract enemies, fashion silencers from bottles and tape, and shiv an uncountable number of [cultists/fungal nightmares/military stand-ins] as Ellie works her way through her hit list. Each individual combat scenario feels well-paced, and there are very few instances where that inherent tension you want in a stealth game isn’t found in earnest.

The world of The Last of Us, Part II is gorgeous, incredibly detailed and full of life amidst the decay of old civilization. Whether it’s the concrete rapids, makeshift bridges atop steel girders and construction equipment, or simply the quieter, overgrown neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, there is a dizzying amount of detail to be found around every nook and cranny. I let out a gasp when I realized I was standing under the Seattle Convention Center, a place I’ve visited in real life and found remarkably accurate in its digital representation. Some combat chambers in deep, underground sanctums are flooded with red light, and watching the shadows of clickers and soldiers shamble about through those spaces is genuinely haunting.

I would be making a tremendous error in judgment if I didn’t make explicit mention of the fact that the detail mentioned above comes at a human cost, with well-founded, exhaustive rumors of painful, debilitating crunch occurring within Naughty Dog. It’s frustrating to think of these things, especially when, as a complete product, The Last of Us, Part II feels like it goes on for about six hours more than it needs to. In the pursuit of more-more-more, something is lost in the process, and while the studio may be receiving tremendous acclaim across the board - and, for the record, I largely enjoyed this! - ruining the people responsible for it through burnout and overwork is never an appropriate price to pay.

The Last of Us, Part II is a game that does not know when to stop, when to pull back, when to simply leave something to the imagination. The first release clocked in a playthrough at about 12, maybe 13 hours. Part II nearly doubles that length on the Normal difficulty, with extensive sections of combat/exploration/combat that don’t always feel necessary or vital to pushing things forward. It lingers on moments of horror and brutality, someone gleefully pointing at The Bad Shit to say, “hey, look! Look at this! Violence is bad, revenge is bad, don’t you see?” It’s not subtle about its core themes, and it doesn’t seem to want to be. When so much of The Last of Us relied on that gray area before veering into the obvious territory of, “yeah, Joel is the bad guy here,” there are several crucial instances where it feels like members of the cast are betraying their own learning and development for the sake of pushing that core theme forward.

It’s also worth noting that there are sections of this story that fall on some incredibly unfortunate tropes surrounding queer and trans characters, some of which feel so obvious to avoid. Without getting into details, it felt kind of gross that a faction founding themselves on “erasing the old you, and building up a newer, truer version of yourself,” would be aggressively transphobic, going so far as to repeatedly deadname one of the story’s main supporting characters and attempting to kill them for their mere existence. It never sat well with me, and even to people who would say, “but that’s the point, Dylan! They’re bad people!” I’d respond by saying that even if that’s the case, it sucks ass that even in this post-apocalyptic setting of escapism, a trans person playing the game can’t get away from that ideology they already encounter in the real world.

Yet, while their handling of trans themes feels somewhat uninspired, you do see flashes of brilliance in that story. While Ellie pushes and is pushed forward into uncomfortable territories, you see her sanity fraying, the long-lingering effects of a life of traumatic experience and awful actions are plain as day on her expression, a credit to Ashley Johnson’s acting prowess in the role. When she realizes she’s made mistakes, they stick with her just long enough to be ignored when she has to go off and do some other Unspeakable Action in the name of the all-powerful Revenge, plunged into another combat section.

Are those combat sections still enjoyable? Yes, for the most part, but when story beats start to overplay the already-overplayed, “We’ve gotta find another way around this obstacle,” card, it…really starts to become obvious that sections of The Last of Us, Part II are stretched out in ways they don’t need to be. When the story feels like it’s reached a powerful, reasonable conclusion for the characters involved, an event occurs that mandates another three hours of gameplay. The beauty gives way to suffering.

Those moments of beauty do come up frequently enough. Ellie can find an astonishing number of functional guitars throughout the world, plucking out tunes or simply practicing with a very well-realized strumming mechanic. You learn that the creative team at Naughty Dog really loves museums, featuring several indulgently detailed and pleasantly un-fungified recreations of famous locations. One late section manages to be tranquil and uplifting, a remarkable breather in a world so obsessed with making its inhabitants feel like dogshit.

A few days after seeing Ellie’s story through to its end, the world and characters of The Last of Us, Part II are still rattling around in my brain. There’s a tremendous story of revenge, loss, and the effects trauma has on a person’s psyche, burdened by the fact that it just doesn’t know how to be brief about anything. There’s a version of this game that’s six or seven hours shorter, just slightly more considered in some respects, and is probably one of the best games and stories I’ve played in an exceptionally long time.

As it is today, it feels like a sign-off in many ways: to this particular story, to the Naughty Dog way of making games, and to this console generation at large. At a certain point, it just felt like suffering through another fruitless combat encounter to get to the end.

Maybe that was the whole idea?