Major SPOILERS ahead for ‘The Last Of Us Part II’, you’ve been warned.
About 18 hours into the The Last Of Us Part II, the protagonist, Ellie, is struggling to decide whether to continue her roaring rampage of revenge against Abby, the person who killed her father figure Joel. After so many hours of being told “killing is bad” and “revenge is bad”, Ellie decides to abandon her peaceful life to go after Abby. It’s at this point, I literally yelled at my TV screen: “What was the whole point of that?!”
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The Last Of Us Part II is a story about how personal grievances can overwhelm us like, well, a brain-eating fungus, and how it will ultimately send us into a vicious circle of bad decisions. Revenge is a good starting point in the exploration of other themes and questions, but using it as the sole foundation can lead to some shaky narrative ground since you can only do so much with it.
The Last Of Us Part II doubles down on the revenge rather than using it as a catalyst and it ultimately proves to be the game’s fatal flaw.
Over the course of The Last Of Us Part II‘s 25-hour story, it continuously asks character arc 101 questions like “how do you feel about taking a life” and “are you just the villain in another person’s story?” Those moral questions are as basic as they come, but can still work if asked and answered properly. Just look at how The Man From Nowhere tackles it.
Yet The Last Of Us Part II struggles to provide even the most basic of answers. The developers seem to think having Ellie undergo little to no growth while repeatedly showing off all the gory deaths in visceral detail counts as enough exploration on the topic. That’s not a triumph in storytelling. That’s just lazy.
Humans learn and change over time. It’s how we grow and how we get a satisfactory narrative. Instead, The Last Of Us Part II keeps making Ellie circle back to that violent revenge pond rather than letting her characterisation develop in any meaningful way.
Violence is nothing new to video games and it’s expected in a fungus zombie-filled post-apocalyptic world like the one in The Last Of Us Part II. But there has to be a point to all the violence, especially if you’re beating everyone over the head with the lesson that taking a life is bad.
Players are given a certain amount of choice whether to partake in the violence in The Last Of Us Part II – you can actually progress through most sections without sticking a switchblade or shiv through someone’s throat. But the players’ decisions ultimately mean nothing because the characters keep making the same, horrible choices over and over again.
Even as things are recontextualised in The Last Of Us Part II‘s second act when the game places you in the shoes of Abby and has you replay the story from before Joel’s death to the present day from her viewpoint, the game still doesn’t have a good argument on how it reconciles the violence with all its moral postulating.
Painting Ellie’s opponents as fully-fleshed out humans with justifiable motivations is an interesting way of creating empathy and instilling the idea that there are no heroes and villains in this particular story. But we’re already convinced by this point that Ellie and Abby are handling things in the wrong way.
The Last Of Us Part II seems to be only interested in recontexualising everything to justify its shaky narrative choices and all the violence. Neither Abby or Ellie face any sort of real reckoning for their roaring rampage of revenge, nor do they even have a proper confrontation about their respective issues despite coming across each other several times throughout The Last Of Us Part II. There’s not much introspection, just a lot of rage.
This sort of nihilism doesn’t equal maturity, no matter how much the game strains to convince you otherwise. Watching Ellie and Abby fall into cycles of violence with little to no character growth isn’t enlightening. It’s just exhausting.
Cynicism and nihilism is a given for anything set in a post-apocalyptic world, but The Last Of Us Part II is especially dour. Its single-minded focus on revenge and vengeance leaves no room for any levity, making the few welcome moments of comic relief feel out of place, or any emotional pay-off by the time the credits roll.
You don’t ever get a sense of closure or even an inkling that Ellie and Abby might’ve just learned something – anything – over the course of The Last Of Us Part II‘s brutal journey.
One can’t help but wonder if the nihilism of The Last Of Us Part II was borne out of the circumstances in which the game was created. Kotaku reported on the brutal crunch schedule in which Naughty Dog developers worked 12+ hour days over the course of several months in order to make the game’s release date.
The final result is is arguably the pinnacle of what a video game can look, feel, and sound at this point in time. In terms of craftsmanship, it’ll be hard to find anything that will top the fantastic performances, visual extravagance, and top-of-the-class sound design in The Last Of Us Part II.
But like Ellie and Abby’s inability to break out of their vicious cycles of bad decision making, this is far from the first time which Naughty Dog has pushed its developers to the brink in pursuit of gaming perfection.
Knowing how bad things were behind-the-scenes in the making of The Last Of Us Part II and the studio’s history of horrendous labour politics, it’s perhaps no surprise the real-world grimness seeped into the final product. Like how the game tries to postulate the idea of people repeatedly making bad decisions, it feels like Naughty Dog is stuck in the same rut.
There’s still value to be found in The Last Of Us Part II amidst the revenge-driven cynicism of Ellie and Abby’s character arcs, and all the gratuitous violence. In terms of craftsmanship, the game is as good as you’re going to get. Just don’t expect its attempts at moral postulating to contain anything of substance. If anything, the most profound thing about the game is its utter lack of profoundness.
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