In hindsight, was Joels death good writing or could it have been handled better?

In hindsight, was Joels death good writing or could it have been handled better? No shitpost answers, i want to hear genuine thought out responses.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't know, I haven't played either game.
    What affect did his death have on the story and its characters?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      getting hung up on his death distracts people from the actual issue the story has. The story is paced and written for a 2 hour movie when it was created for a 20 hour game. The Abby flashback wouldn't have been so painful if it lasted 10-20 minutes but to actually stretch it out to 10 hours made people resent her even more than they already did.

      I thought it was poorly written. The Joel and Tommy in the first game would not have entered a room full of strangers. Neil should have kept his vision for the show separate from the game. The Joel they have in the show is a pussy just like he is in part 2

      They made Joel act out of character for it to happen, but I guess you could argue he had gotten less vigilant. If they really had to make a TLOU2 they should have just followed entirely new characters.

      Why people refuse to admit the only reason Abby is built like a man because Sony wanted to replace the white male protagonist with yet another ugly woman but they still needed the gameplay made exclusively for a man so they gave a man's body to a woman?
      >"why is she built like Lesnar?"
      >"for revenge"
      >have him exactly where she wants him, completely outnumbered, subdued, hurt and powerless
      >doesn't jam a nail in his balls
      >doesn't stomp on his head to squash it like a watermelon
      >doesn't break his arms, then his legs, then his neck
      >doesn't punch his face until her hands bleed
      >doesn't even strangle him
      >doesn't stick her thumbs in his eye socket
      >le golf club, a tool a CHILD could use to kill a human bean
      He definitely did it to see if people made the connection, to spite the audience, and very few picked up on it.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        you are schizophrenic get help

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Why even have her built like that when she never uses her muscles to kill Joel? She could’ve killed him with a golf club regardless.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Because a woman thinner than Ellie could never beat men up the way Joel does.
          Basically Nadine 2.0.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    getting hung up on his death distracts people from the actual issue the story has. The story is paced and written for a 2 hour movie when it was created for a 20 hour game. The Abby flashback wouldn't have been so painful if it lasted 10-20 minutes but to actually stretch it out to 10 hours made people resent her even more than they already did.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It was supposed to be shocking, like Sarahs death in 1 but with the addition that you had a whole game to get attached to Joel. In that regards it totally accomplished it's goal. The fanbase being mostly manchildren is the problem.

      Pleb take

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        sup cuckman

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        God what a terrible opinion. You literally have nothing.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Not to dismiss your point since I felt the same way when the game switched to Abby, but I got over it once I realized the gameplay itself only got better in Abby's half. Yeah, I didn't want her to succeed and kill Ellie, but I also didn't care about that when I was having way more fun fighting super zombies and smoking cultists on horseback as She-Man.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It's because Abby played exactly like Joel did from TLoU1 to drive home the parallels of her and Lev to Joel and Ellie. Ellie is more stealth oriented, but Abbie gets assault rifles and can bash people's heads in. I didn't care much for the character, but her gameplay was peak kino.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Best parts of the game (gameplay wise) are definitely late Abby chapters. It’s a shame that it takes so long for a game to open up.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >The story is good because the gameplay is fun
        The usual moronation on Ganker

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Totally agree. Joel death is actually a great jumping point for a part 2, and the fact that Ellie and Joel were on, somewhat, bad terms when they last saw each other is a good justification for Ellie blindly seeking revenge.

      What totally destroys any sense of urgency and impact is the meandering Abby chapters and that last-moment decision of forgiveness. The game is actually pretty good, but it gets drowned by a story that reminds me of a schoolwork done at the last hour where you just write shit down and have no time to actually connect anything in a logical way.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        getting hung up on his death distracts people from the actual issue the story has. The story is paced and written for a 2 hour movie when it was created for a 20 hour game. The Abby flashback wouldn't have been so painful if it lasted 10-20 minutes but to actually stretch it out to 10 hours made people resent her even more than they already did.

        This is the most well thought out post about TLOU2 I've seen so far that I'd agree with. The story wasn't the problem, it was the pacing and structure of it.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          The story was the problem, it's a failure to understand what motivates people and to craft characters that aren't storybook moral tier. Abby should've been absolutely terrified and trying to kill herself by the time the showdown on the beach happened. A random-ass daughter from a random ass character went on a revenge quest and she literally started the cycle the game tries to shove down your throat as negative. Except Ellie's the bad guy when she wants to get revenge for her "father's" death. Revenge isn't positive or healthy, but it is cathartic. You can reflect on your flaws after killing your enemy and giving yourself time to think. The audience will hate missed catharsis even if that's the point.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Story has problems but it’s not what everyone keeps repeating for sure.
      >Flashbacks and a reveal that Ellie made up with Joel were poorly placed and paced.
      Game should have had a whole Jackson chapter where you play as Joel and see this dynamic unfold. When you see Joel die you should already know that they’ve made up.
      >Abby decides to just let Ellie go, after seeing her ex, dog and all of her friends slaughtered THE SAME DAY she fights Ellie.
      Like I get that she’s on a path of redemption but given her history of being aggressive - ain’t no way.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I have no history of violence but if someone killed my cat and my friends, and I catch them... they dead. Caillou saying stop or whatever would fall on deaf ears.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I thought it was poorly written. The Joel and Tommy in the first game would not have entered a room full of strangers. Neil should have kept his vision for the show separate from the game. The Joel they have in the show is a pussy just like he is in part 2

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Absolutely could have been done better.

      They made Joel act out of character for it to happen, but I guess you could argue he had gotten less vigilant. If they really had to make a TLOU2 they should have just followed entirely new characters.

      and

      Killing off Joel was never the problem, it was doing it in an extremely unsatisfying way which called for him to be painfully out of character to even get into that situation, carried out by some literally who which we are then forced to play as. It was asinine and undeserved, there was nothing deep or interesting about it and that is only made worse by Frickmann trying to play it off like some sort of artistic masterpiece.

      were right on the money: better writers like Hennig worked on the original TLoU, the same ones Cuckmann deliberately weeded out to gain more control over Naughty Dog staff and crunch, underpay and abuse them to death. It's why no sane person takes Part II (or the IP's whole future at this point) seriously beyond 'what could have been' or the memes.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They made Joel act out of character for it to happen, but I guess you could argue he had gotten less vigilant. If they really had to make a TLOU2 they should have just followed entirely new characters.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      That was the original idea. They dont trust their super smart and super understanding audience to buy the sequel if it doesnt have muhJoel

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I guess you could argue he had gotten less vigilant.
      For about 3 years Joel got to fill the void of Sarah with Ellie, until she was pissed with him so he spent 2 years being a distant protector. The normalcy of Jackson was compared to how life was pre-outbreak. I do think he grew soft. We see him cry during the flashback of Ellie forgiving Joel.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Its somehow worse in the show because everyone in Tommy's village is a paranoid frick willing to shoot any strangers.
      I honestly forgot if this happened in the game too, probably did.
      Either way, they went from being paranoid as frick in fear of raiders to just welcoming a bunch of strangers during a horde. You can claim Joel had gone soft but Tommy too? and Ellie?
      But if they REALLY wanted him dead, I guess that makes more sense than manly mc muscles sneaking in at night and slashing his throat

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >You can claim Joel had gone soft but Tommy too?
        Tommy went way softer than Joel way faster than Joel did. If anything Tommy was always the softer of the two. Even on the day everything went to shit Tommy wanted to let a family get into their car and Joel refused. And on the day Joel dies it is Tommy that gives their names both times.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You could make Joel lower his guard around outsiders work, but for that to work you would need to develop his character a bit before he dies.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Joel's death was done poorly.
      A better way to do it would be to start the game with Joel, then pull a MGS2 after an hour and give you Abby. You spend the next 10 hours as her, and she's part of a raiding community, and one day they raid a place and you end up fighting an NPC that hunts you down, is more intelligent, faster, moves in an out of areas unlike other NPCs, throws bottles to trigger your "spider sense" and keeps you on edge, picks off your comrades one by one in gross and gratuitous ways.
      At the end, you finally confront him and kill him, and it's Joel. The madman was soloing your entire raiding party while the community rallied and locked down. Your raid is a failure, and Abby's community has multiple "good" people starve the next winter, before succumbing to another group of raiders.

      THEN you switch to Ellie and her quest for vengeance, and the story slowly reveals to her that Abby was just another person fighting for survival, just like you. You get the CHOICE to kill or spare her, and an appropriate ending of either innocence lost and being unable to go back home, or the realization that your quest for vengeance was selfish and pointless, that Joel died for a good reason, to protect everyone, and you hunting down the last member of that failed raiding community was pointless in the end.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I guess it was fine for the story they wanted to tell. The issue is that Joel just isn't that kind of character and the story they wanted to tell doesn't really work.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Killing off Joel was never the problem, it was doing it in an extremely unsatisfying way which called for him to be painfully out of character to even get into that situation, carried out by some literally who which we are then forced to play as. It was asinine and undeserved, there was nothing deep or interesting about it and that is only made worse by Frickmann trying to play it off like some sort of artistic masterpiece.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    After numerous replays, yes. Here's why.
    I'm assuming Joel is riding on an emotional high because Ellie told him the night before that she's ready to forgive him, they were supposed to watch a movie the night he died. He's sent out on patrol and comes across a lone survivor and saves her from a horde. He (and Tommy) then proceeds to fight for their lives from infected in the Ski Lift, and when things are looking bad because they may not be able to make it back to Jackson, Abby suggests a nearby place of refuge. Why wouldn't you be inclined in that situation to trust someone you just saved and fought alongside with? I just helped her, and now she's helping me (clueless.jpg).
    Even the WLF were friendly to them until Joel introduced himself. Asides from the obvious like Mel introducing herself to Tommy, everyone's demeanor completely changed when Joel mentioned his name. They were friendly, until they weren't.
    I also don't think Abby running into Joel the way she did is a contrivance as it's set up during the opening hours of both Ellie and Abby's campaign.
    Ellie
    >mentions of increased infected sightings so Maria sent out Joel and Tommy

    Abby
    >Owen points out an armed patrol (Joel and Tommy) that went to a specific location
    >Abby follows tracks (being a trained tracker I guess, that's her backstory) to the specified location where she runs into the armed patrol, Joel and Tommy.
    Maybe they could have done more, cut out the snowball fight for more Abby?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Yes what?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yes what what?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          kay

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >most thorough answer gets ignored

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >ESL babble deserves attention because it's thorough
        No.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >ESL because....he just is OK?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >Is it A or B
            >"Yes"
            I guess he could also just be a spastic, sure.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          is goyslop already out of fashion? have we switched to ESL as our favourite buzzword now?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Well written anon, my problem isn't that Joel dies, my problem is how he dies. Joel should not have been put in a situation to directly save Abby's life, I don't think she even hesitated in killing him or considering the fact this random stranger saved her. There are much better ways to provide a consequence to Joel's actions

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I think it would have worked better if Tommy had saved Abby in the snow.
        As it stands, Abby doesn't even express any feelings about the man saving her life also being Joel that killed her father.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Wrong board

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The idea of Joel dying is okay.
    The idea of Joel dying by just randomly telling someone his name is really stupid. Even if he grew soft, it really seemed contrived.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      He didn't. Tommy did.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No, it was bad writing. He dies a moronic death at the hands of a playable character that the player likely doesn't care about. The idea of Joel dying to progress the story is fine, it was just executed very poorly.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >In hindsight, was Joels death good writing or could it have been handled better?
    The death? Sure. Everything about how it's excuted and presented? No.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Out of curiosity
      What would you change about how it's executed/presented to make it better?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Don't kill the most beloved characters of the previous game in a gotcha shock value move out of The Walking Dead. If you want to keep the story mostly the same, you have to start the player as Abby and make it so you've got a connection with her up until then. Make us stunned and surprised that Abby just shot JOEL MCLASTOFUS because we like her so much already because we played as her for like 3 hours already and had no idea she was carrying all that rage.

        What we have instead of just cheap shit for AMC primetime shock porn shows. Druckmann just wanted to copy Glen getting NEGAN'd and how people reacted to that.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Druckmann just wanted to copy Glen getting NEGAN'd
          I never thought about it like that, but that makes 100% perfect sense.
          I just thought he was a bad writer, not a worse writer copying bad writers.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            he's also a big fan of GoT show, and The last skywalker.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Druckmann just wanted to copy Glen getting NEGAN'd
          I never thought about it like that, but that makes 100% perfect sense.
          I just thought he was a bad writer, not a worse writer copying bad writers.

          just wanted to copy Glen getting NEGAN'd
          Frick me now I hate Cuckman even more, frick you!

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            https://i.imgur.com/KPcxlZz.jpg

            In hindsight, was Joels death good writing or could it have been handled better? No shitpost answers, i want to hear genuine thought out responses.

            i want eliie to die instead of joel. not only i hate woman but when i found out the reason why Druckman wanted to kill joel because he said his story is finished and he wanted to kill him to be considered as a white man humiliation.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Start with Abby yeah. And give Joel a good death. One where he actually got outsmarted in a believable way and not one where he just fricks up for no reason.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            What if they had the player have to control Abby to kill Joel?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Holy shit I never thought about that. But then again, I fell off walking dead at like season 2.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Druckmann just wanted to copy Glen getting NEGAN'd and how people reacted to that.
          I fell off the Walking Dead boat when they killed off Merle tbh. I heard about ole asian boy getting his head popped like a melon. Pretty sure Coral is gone too now. There's a reason why shows stop at a certain point otherwise everyone is getting taken out the back to spice up the ratings.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        1. Have WAY more lead-up to Joel's death. Abby's reasoning being over Part I's hospital slaughter already makes sense, but being shown right at the start will just make most players loathe any objectives she might have. Like with the intro, Abby's scenario should be interwoven with Elly's whilst keeping her real goals ambiguous, but with more time added to make the player connect better. You'll still likely have that itch for vengeance if the reasons why she did it are kept a mystery until afterwards as well, thus keeping the theme and player intent intact, but now with a better-built internal conflict over it.
        2. Don't write pre-established characters to act OOC and thus taking away any serious thought given to the plot itself, instead now being focused on where the writing process went wrong.
        3. Maybe don't make your new character(s) a walking moronic bundle of virtue signals that don't even resemble believable human beings, especially considering we only now suddenly see it everywhere after decades of collapsed society worrying about real issues.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It could have been handled a lot better, even if the point was to set the game up and had nothing to do with hating people interpreting a character different than the author intended or wanting to be edgy by "subverting expectations" for the sake of it.
    I think several people have said before but it sort of stretches character, you could argue Joel had gotten less vigilant but it's just played in a way that it doesn't feel entirely believable or like it wasn't forced to set the plot in motion.
    And forcing a character death for an integral character you've heavily established and invested players in is kind of stupid and shallow, it's almost spiteful, I would have liked his death to have been used better or taken more seriously.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It could've been handled better.
    The plot of "the mistakes of a man coming back to haunt him" is hardly new,. The problem is that it was done by someone trying to elevate video games to films, only to fail flat on his face because he is following hollywood trends like "dude what if we made the viewer mad XD like they wouldn't be expecting it" and imitating narratives used in other mediums.
    A good narrative would have made it so Abby side of the story played first with no mention of Joel, only of someone who killed her dad with the grand twist that it was Joel.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Should I play the second game bros? I assume it’s on pc by now and can get it on sale or pirate

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Absolutely not, If you liked the first one and you thought it had a decent ending I would leave at that and fill in your own headcanon in what happens afterwards.

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    not really, i mean Abbys murderous rage is unredeemable since they failed at making her compelling character like Joel and Ellie, its over someone nobody knows and cares about to (doctor), who most likely isnt even proper surgeon(and arguing somelike like regular vet/medic can do brain surgery is beyond laughable)

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Two main issues. One is that this is a video game, so the lesson with Abby and the cycle of violence is lost. The second is that Joel was a bit too comfortable in the situation.
    Both of these thing could be fixed in the show. Hopefully Druckmann isn't stubborn

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Its weird that the plot bends over backwards just to kill joel. For some reason they also decided to make Abby and Ellie pretty unlikable so the only thing you can root for is vengeance for joel which doesn't happen.

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's such a weird gamble to kill a beloved character with a new character that you're supposed to symapthise with that I can only assume they were too incompetent to realize. They probably should have made Joel's death later in the game and given you time with Abby beforehand and actually made her likeable. Shit they could have had her categorically say she's out to kill her father's murderer without the audience putting two and two together, then to a degree the player would have felt responsible when Joel was killed because they were in agreement with Abby until they realized who she was out to kill.

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was good writing and joelgays are forever assblasted.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    putting aside fandom butthurt, it's hilariously bad game design to take a new character like abby, have them kill the previous game's well established protagonist (the first game spent most of its time getting you to empathize with him and ellie) and then kill him violently before anyone has to start liking abby or agreeing with her point of view
    game needed like 2x more playtime of abby before this scene happened, maybe add some background about her emotional state

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      before anyone has the time to start liking abby*

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    How many Joels did Abby murder before finding the right one

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      ALL OF THEM

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It's canon that being called Joel is third highest cause of death in the tlou universe.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The title "The Last of Us" means that our Joel was the last of Joels

  22. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It might have made sense if it was like, 10 hours in and it made sense for the player and characters to trust Abby more.

  23. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Eh, joel's death wasn't too offensive. I have a bigger problem with immediately making you play as abby and trying to make you sympathize with her, which at that point she is probably one of the most hated characters in gaming.

  24. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    never played it and never will because of the troony filth. just reading through this thread makes me think everything about joel's death was terrible and shock-cringe though

  25. 1 year ago
    Naruto Uzumaki

    It's absolute shit writing, does Abby golf everyone named Joel in the head?

    How did she know he was the right Joel?

    Weren't there more Joel's in Jackson?

    Dogshit, hackjob writing, simple as

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >It's absolute shit writing, does Abby golf everyone named Joel in the head?

      Yes.

  26. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No but the way they did it and the reason they did was both unsatisfying and cynical

  27. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Last of us 2 (not part II)
    >marketed as a new story unrelated to the first game
    >play as Abby
    >events play out very similarly to part II excluding all of the Ellie plot
    >seraphites, WLF
    >meeting lev and realizing seraphites and WLF are all shitty
    >attempt to find the fireflies while learning more about Abby’s past
    >tensions grow as you realize you’re actually hunting Joel down
    >lev unknowingly leads you to him
    >you as the player beat joel to death
    >Ellie screams
    >cut to black
    They’re fixed it. Sets up a 3rd game. Not super original but neither was the first game.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I actually really liked the way they went about it. I see people proposing story revisions like this all the time, and while that may have made for a more conventionally satisfying story, I think placing Joel's murder at the start of the game makes for a much more challenging narrative.

      The fact that so many detractors argue that Joel's murder should have taken place after the game introduces Abby and thoroughly explains her motivations just goes to show that, in a vacuum, her actions are understandable and somewhat relatable. People who suggest changes like this are admitting that they just cannot emotionally get over that first impression we are given of Abby.

      I think though that that's what the game is challenging people to try and do. Ultimately it's a game about perspectives. It's about how differences in perspective can lead to immense differences in the way certain actions are perceived and judged.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >makes for a much more challenging narrative.
        Frick off israelite

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          You've sacrificed the entire thematic and emotional core of the game for the sake of a shitty plot twist. The fricking irony for you to talk about bad writing lol

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Nope. Shut the frick up israelite. "Challenging" is code for "subversive horseshit".

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >turns into a /misc/ lard anti-semite the moment he has to actually think

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              lmao at you family
              you get verbally pwned and turn into a troglodyte as a defense mechanism

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        As a premise, sure, it's a more challenging narrative. The problem is when you completely fail that challenge, which is what happened with TLOU2. Setting up a challenging narrative is absolutely great when you can actually achieve something with that challenge, but that's not what happened here. It was utterly squandered. It's not up to the writer to challenge the audience to put up with their bullshit or think of ways and reasons why to accept the horrid dreck they created.

        Eating a turd sandwich is a hell of a challenge, but you're not some amazing chef for shitting on a slice of bread and offering it up.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I had a positive reaction to the story, but I can understand why a lot of people didn't. I think continuing to hate Abby is a perfectly valid response to the questions the game is asking.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Well, congratulations on having no standards I guess? Allow me to offer you some advice in parting; Just coming up and saying "I like blue :D" to people isn't going to achieve anything meaningful unless you offer some kind of value based commentary along with that comment. It's a lot more worthwhile to tell people WHY you like something rather than merely stating the fact that you did like something. All you've established is that you have no taste and are a terrible conversationalist.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Part of the reason I like it is just that it does something different. When the second game was announced, I was expecting a tired retread of the Joel / Ellie adventure from the first game. The fact that those expectations were disproven so early, and so violently, was a daring choice I thought, and I explained in my first post how I enjoyed the challenging structure. I thought the characterisation of Abby in the second half of the game was well done, (buoyed as it was by talent of the actors involved), and by the end I liked her enough as a character to make the confrontation with Ellie a genuinely tense and emotionally complicated finale.

              There's no need to be so condescending in your posts btw.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                If me being genuine comes off as condescending to you, then you might have some issues to resolve with. No point blaming others for the things you don't like about yourself.
                >I thought the characterisation of Abby in the second half of the game was well done
                How? All it was is inconsistent. She's a complete and utter psychopath for the first half of the game and then suddenly she's well adjusted and demure and there's no narrative tying those two things together. The traumatic event that might have caused her to snap into the deranged lunatic we see murder Joel happened long before the time we see her be well adjusted and reasonable and she just snaps back to it as though she didn't just sadistically murder someone while their loved ones begged her to stop. This isn't a simple case of revenge, this was revenge porn, and the story makes no effort to actually address this in the narrative, it just glosses over it. Seriously how can you even describe that shit in the second half of the game as "characterisation" when it's literally just a completely different person.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >She's a complete and utter psychopath for the first half of the game and then suddenly she's well adjusted and demure and there's no narrative tying those two things together.
                just like ellie? she's a psychopath in seattle and demure at the farm.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Witnessing your loved one be tortured to death does that to a person. Ellie in no way redeems herself over the course of the game at all. Torturing someone and then becoming a charismatic happy go lucky girl with a foster trans boy 2 weeks later is unbelievable, coming to terms with it and moving on after a long period of time IS believable ala Joel in the first game.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Part of the reason I like it is just that it does something different. When the second game was announced, I was expecting a tired retread of the Joel / Ellie adventure from the first game. The fact that those expectations were disproven so early, and so violently, was a daring choice I thought, and I explained in my first post how I enjoyed the challenging structure. I thought the characterisation of Abby in the second half of the game was well done, (buoyed as it was by talent of the actors involved), and by the end I liked her enough as a character to make the confrontation with Ellie a genuinely tense and emotionally complicated finale.
                >
                >There's no need to be so condescending in your posts btw.
                it does not do anything different. we've seen this story done before better in multiple other examples of fiction. God of War 3 is a better story about why revenge doesn't heal your wounds. TLOU2 is pathetic.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        There are far more problems with Abby than her killing Joel. And you might either be autistic, a sociopath (like Abby), or have Narcissistic Personality Disorder if you can't see that.

        You see, the writing was so poorly done that her actions were not understandable or relatable beyond the vague human theme of revenge, which is why people were trying to fix her side of the story. The sociopathic b***h goes from being grateful and welcoming to 2 people who just saved her fricking life multiple times, to stone cold brutal torture and murder in less than time than it took Joel to finish saying his name, and the game at no point ever makes her sympathetic enough to justify it all.

        People can get revenge. They can get survivor's guilt. And they can get that Joel has enough skeletons in his past that someone will be gunning for them. What they can't get is that we are supposed to sympathize with a roided out socipath with 0 redeeming qualities while being preached at by a hack like Cuckmann.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >detractors
        >challenging narrative
        I can smell the SÖY from miles away

  28. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel's death I guess in this world, but Ellie's revenge quest that involved several people dying only for her to get to Abby and say frick it IS terrible writing

  29. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    After finishing the sequel, I have to say it feels a bit like the writers got really angry at how many people sympathized with Joel's decision at the end of the first game (they wanted it to be DIVISIVE instead) so TLOU2's story was pieced together

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      They accidentally made a story that made modern men feel paternal and had to rememdy that quick smart

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This is such a common observation that I can't imagine it's not the truth.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It's a stupid observation and if you genuinely think this

        After finishing the sequel, I have to say it feels a bit like the writers got really angry at how many people sympathized with Joel's decision at the end of the first game (they wanted it to be DIVISIVE instead) so TLOU2's story was pieced together

        then it makes me wonder what you think the game was about. Let me guess, REVENGE BAD?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Settle down, Druckmann.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Not an argument. People here don't discuss the game, they vaguely dance around misunderstood in-game details as they shit on the game

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >Not an argument
              You didn't make one either, Druck. Go ahead and enlighten me on the game's themes as you understand them, and then present me with a 200-word essay on how they conflict with the statement you disagreed with above. I'll give you no more than 24 hours.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          If the game sin't about "REVENGE BAD" what is it about?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Don’t ask people questions they don’t have answers to. Modern writers rely on video essayists to make their stories seem more complex than they are. The story is about revenge bad with a sprinkle of survivors guilt because thats a thing I learned exists from my psych/english lit class.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Not all the writers just Neil

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It was a surprising ending. I really thought ellie was gonna die for the greater good. 90% of all zombie series would have had her die to save the world. One man singlehandedly said frick the world because he couldn't let a little girl go.

  30. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it was fricking terrible

  31. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel's death as a catalyst to a story has potential. The problem was the lead up was moronic due to characters acting stupid to get into their situation and the payoff was a poorly executed "revenge am bad" story that couldn't even stick the landing.

  32. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it shouldn't have been so abrupt
    you took half of the best thing about the first game and then immediately killed it and expected people to not be pissed?

  33. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Depends entirely on context, which is why it was so bad. If they wanted to make Abbey look like a complete psychopath and have her be a major villain then that scene is A+, she's clearly portrayed as a rabid dog that ought to be put down. The problem with the whole scenario is that the game then expects you to go "awwww wook she's nice to puppies :D".

    Otherwise, if you wanted it to just be an emotional moment or do something with her as a character you make her actually react to the fact that Ellie is there begging her to stop instead of having her sadistically continue her actions. Have Joel (barely) survive and pass away later from his injuries and you have time to have both Ellie and Abbey deal with the consequences, Abbey can be repentant and Ellie can be furious and you leave most of the latter half of the game in-tact, and it makes much more sense for Abbey to spare Ellie later when they fight (and cut that ridiculous dialogue about her being rather gleeful about the fact that she was going to murder the pregnant chick)

    Right now the whole scenario is just a fricking mess.

  34. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Its absolutely insane how Druckmann wanted people to feel sympathy/relation for her after this scene. Even if I didn't like Joel why would I root for some vengeful c**t who made a person who just saved her life suffer for literally no reason when she could have just shot him and been done with it. Hell the game acts like he killed her father in cold blood when he was a moron who pulled a blade on a guy with a gun.

  35. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The problem is not killing joel off
    The problem is that anyone with even a slight sense of bullshittery detection can tell the reason he was killed off in this way is because he is a heterosexual white male in a game that's way more concerned about lesbianism, transgenderism, atypical bodytypes and suffer porn than survival

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I am a literal national socialist and you need some fricking meds dude. Not every single piece of media ever made is “white bad, male bad, hetero bad, masculine bad.”

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        (You)
        Hey guys, nazi here.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It is though, it's made by israelites

  36. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I enjoyed the game and the overal idea but writing was all over the place. The death itself wasn't bad but what lead to it as well as what it lead to was poorly written. It wasn't written in a way to fit the "realistic" setting of the game and what was already established about the characters but rather to serve as an excuse the motives that the writter wanted to put in the game. Does it make sense? Hope it does.

  37. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't even know or remember why they killed him. It still seems like the reason they killed him was purely for shock value to the viewer. So yes, I would call that bad writing.

  38. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Him dying is fine it's just the fact that he died because he told them his name. Maybe if he had a really obscure name it could work but it just seems like the group goes around killing everyone called Joel.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      i think the stupidest part is the fact Abby treks cross an entire state on 15 year old rumors

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Where are you getting 15 years from?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Out of ten

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          it wasn't 15 years it was 10 but yeah it's just a fricking rumor

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Where is ten even from? The second game only takes place 4 years after the first one. Or are you talking about Abby going after the Firefly base?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Okay moron, i'll quote her directly.
              "I found Joel's brother" - Abby
              "He's at a settlement out in Wyoming." - Abby
              "How d'you know that?" - guy
              "Some fireflies who served with him got picked up at the wall." - abby
              "I thought he quit like a decade ago." - guy
              "Yeah..."

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                ok, fair enough I'd forgotten that conversation.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It's my biggest peeve, otherwise I don't really care and think it's based on opinion, I liked the father&daughter role more than whatever the second game was trying to be about.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It does definitely strain credulity, but one could make the argument that once someone's established a community somewhere, they're not really going to be moving around much more after that. Tommy was one of the founders of the town at Jackson, so it's reasonable to assume he's still there.

                But I do see what you're saying.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I don't think Tommy had a settlement when he quit the fireflies my bro, he might have had an idea and a location planned out though, which he might have talked about.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                it isn't his settlement, he just became the leader? I can't remember

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Yeah, presumably that's what those rumours that Abby's talking about are concerning. It might have been Tommy's original idea all along to get the hydroelectric dam working, and then the town emerged as a result of that.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Regardless it would be a fine place to pick up any trail. Still seems a bit absurd but it's not uncommon for writers to have no understanding of scale. It's a huge distance to travel and an unfathomably large surface to search for a person of which you know next to nothing beside their name. No one in their right mind would even try it, would deem it an impossible task. The man could well have died at any point in those 10 years or be forced to move by any number of factors like other factions or raiders, he could have adopted a pseudonym and you have no idea what they actually look like. It's such an absurd wild goose chase all for the sake of "Well I'm still very mad my dad died when he tried to kill a girl his killer cared about :("

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Going by Abby's dialogue before all that it's pretty clear they would have killed anyone named Joel, yes. They actively discuss torturing people for information on 'Joel'.

  39. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >kills Joel with a golf club
    >le HECKIN' sick Bioshock reference!!!1
    >GRRRL POWER!

  40. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It could have been good if they handled it better.
    >start the game out with you playing as Abby in her flashback, and make it longer and not so heavy handed with the "look at this wholesome dad, bet you'll feel bad if he DIES!"
    >Game plays out the same up until Abby runs into Joel and Tommy
    >Rather than Tommy hand delivering their identities to a complete rando (after earlier making a point to highlight bandit raids are still a thing, and Joel especially's been on a cross country murder spree.) he offers fake names and things play out the same with making it back to the safe house.
    >From there one of two things happen, either they get to know Joel and Tommy, and over time they figure out through context clues that he's the guy, or they don't find out until a patrol makes it out there later and THEY'RE the ones that spill the beans while calling out their names or directly addressing them by name, which leads to the shootout, knockout, torture, and death.
    The rest of the game plays out the same from there.

  41. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The Last of Us's writing is incredibly contrived, in both games. Things happen not because it makes sense, but it because it needs to happen for them to tell the story they wanted.
    They tried to portray Joel as a monster in the first game. I assume they were going for a "Spec Ops twist". But they failed, because they're bad at writing. So they instead went for the "he ruined Abby's life because he killed her daddy :(", and constructed the circumstances to allow her to kill him, even if they don't make sense.

    It's melodrama for the worst reasons, written by emotionally-stunted Millennial c**ts.

  42. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Both Abby and Joel deserved to die, but Ellie pussies out because >she is trans.

  43. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They made their villain too inhumanly stupid to sympathize with.

  44. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    please move on

  45. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it was just a israelite being crybaby. Cuckmann is so fricking pissed people liked the first game since the best parts of it came from bruce stanley, so in a way he is killing and making the other guy's characters suffering while trying to make people enjoy the shitty woke boring characters he created on his own.

  46. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it exposed the haters as literal children crying over their favorite character being killed

  47. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Fricking complainers are literally proving the point the game disliking Abby. You're supposed to feel uncomfortable playing as her.

    Perspective was meant to show Ellie as an equally vicious antagonist, you didn't need to sympathize with Abby to see Ellie as a balls-to-the-wall killer.

    Once you play Ellie again you don't even feel relieved. Game comes to a morally grey ending "cyclical revenge is badddd"

    Y'all are making the wrong arguments.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Y'all

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >UHH IT'S MEANT TO BE SHIT ON PURPOSE!
      cope

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Game comes to a morally grey ending "cyclical revenge is badddd"
      which is shit because cuckmann is a hack and accidently create the perfect situation for revenge. If Ellie kills Abby and Lev at the end she gets away with it 100%. There're no witnesses and any Firefly that comes across their bodies will just think the Rattlers killed them. There is zero chance someone figures out it was Ellie and the cycle of revenge is broken with her getting revenge. You could still end it with "revenge bad" since she returns to an empty farm all alone but you wouldn't have a divisive ending that way. The ending is the way it is purely because cuckmann thinks controversial = good writing.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Or if Abby and frens decided to kill Tommy and Ellie instead of leaving them alive for some reason.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Y'all are making the wrong arguments.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >You're SUPPOSED to feel bad!!
      This is as weak a defense as "I was only pretending". Which I'm sure you were, right?

  48. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    If they removed that unnecessary long torture scene, then Abby would be completely justified in her revenge. But we can't have that because that would ruin the whole violence beget violence lesson they're trying to shove down our throat.

  49. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I think it was a reaction to all the dudebros who played Tlou1 and looked a Joel as their hero. When you play tlou1 your ultimate conclusion is supposed to be "wow joel's a pretty toxic male for thinking of his selfish need for a daughter over finding a cure" but that went over a lot of people's heads so in the sequel they tried to hit it home a lot more.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >When you play tlou1 your ultimate conclusion is supposed to be "wow joel's a pretty toxic male for thinking of his selfish need for a daughter over finding a cure" but that went over a lot of people's heads

      Pretty sure you ducked when the ending flew straight at your face.

      You're not supposed to have a sure answer. We can't know if Joel's choice was wrong or right. We just are a part of him making it. That's why the ending cutscene finishes on a hard cut - there's no answer for you or Ellie.

  50. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel death isn't really the problem. It's how they handled it that is. You got a guy that was cautious in the previous game blurt out his real name in the second and get killed for it. The differing attitude of the 1st with the 2nd character doesn't match up. They also didn't build up Abby's character to be sympathetic until way later in the game. It was already too late by then and the attempts to make her sympathetic come off as manipulative rather than reasonable. They should've had more time building up Abby working with Ellie for at least for the first 40% of the game before they pull off the shocking death and later reveal of who she was. Maybe have Ellie accidentally reveal his name by accident as that's why Joel was killed, even though they were helping each other to survive all up to that moment. They did a shocking death at the beginning to just be a shocking death instead of for any real logical reason that their conflict would occur at that moment other than convenience or contrivance.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Unironically, if we remove the whole Joel aspect, Abby is pretty much a hero through and through. She had somehow given up on revenge when Ellie killed her friends and broke the cycle of revenge. She even forsaken the lives of many just to save the live of a single person like Joel did. But the execution of the story had pretty much ruined any chance of her being liked by the fans.

  51. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's a shock value moment that the story doesn't capitalize on. Like literally EVERY other moment in the story, it's just a plot convenience they forced to happen so they could get to the next story beat. I think all Cuckman had written for TLoU2 was "Giant lesbian fights tiny lesbian to the death" and then just went step by step backwards trying to get them there. "Uh well small lesbian drops a map of her exact location and BIG lesbo finds it."

  52. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't really understand the argument that Joel was stupid for telling Abby's group his name. Before the events of the first game, he'd presumably spent years as a raider - and yet he never felt the need to operate under a pseudonym in the first game (he told Henry and Sam his name, for example).

    I don't think even the most cautious person is going to be constantly looking over their shoulders for the family members of people you killed four years prior.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The whole criticism is mental gymnastics. They don't want to admit that the primary reason they hated it was because their vidya daddy got killed. Same thing with other bs like "Abby can't be so buff in the apolcalypse"
      Honourable mention, "Its badly written because Ellies converses wouldn't last the whole game" (I swear I've read that one here)

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Same thing with other bs like "Abby can't be so buff in the apolcalypse"
        tell me you're a fat frick without telling me you're a fat frick

  53. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I can look past the contrivances of Abby just happening to stumble into the one person she was looking for. The inherent problem for me is how Abby is ultimately handled as a character.

    Abby is intentionally set up as cruel in order to piss off the player. Not just torturing someone to death in front of their screaming daughter, but doing it minutes after they went out of their way to save her life. But beyond that, Joel's death and the emotional aftermath of it don't have ANYTHING to do with Abby's core story. She barely even mentions it again. She didn't care about the cure or the Fireflies. It's all an afterthought compared to her conflict with slaughtering the cultists, but she has the audacity to act surprised and offended that someone else would in turn come after her looking for revenge too. There's zero self awareness or care over why Ellie is doing what she's doing, and likewise, Ellie never learns a thing about Abby.

    I realize that's the whole point. No one really cares about their enemy's reasoning, they're just pissed off. But neither character really grows or develops throughout their experience, because they're about as bad as they can get by the very start of their mission. And yet the game tries so hard to make us sympathize with Abby's side of things. But I still don't care about her just because she pets a dog, or because she suddenly decided that she'll murder all her WLF comrades instead of more cultists, or because she didn't kill a pregnant woman even though she really really wanted to. They're all just terrible from start to finish. Ellie and Abby never have a solid reason to let each other go, because they never even interacted beyond kicking the shit out of each other and horribly killing each other's loved ones.

    And I don't know why this game pisses me off so much in particular. I suppose because it fricks over a bittersweet and ambiguous ending that I would rather they have left alone.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I can look past the contrivances of Abby just happening to stumble into the one person she was looking for.
      It's not a contrivance. Maria sends out Tommy and Joel to scout regarding increased infected sightings. Owen spotted an armed patrol move to a specified location. Abby heads into the general direction, finds tracks and follows them to the location and meets the armed patrol, Joel and Tommy.
      It doesn't happen out of nowhere

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Abby's entire mission was based around the vague rumor that Tommy was still alive in another settlement across the country, and that they were going to invade his community and torture him for info on the off-chance that he MIGHT know where Joel is.

        The fact that she just happens to stumble into the one person that she's actually hunting, at the one time that he's vulnerable, is a pretty convenient coincidence.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >and that they were going to invade his community and torture him for info on the off-chance that he MIGHT know where Joel is.
          They weren't going to invade. Owen wanted to turn back when he saw how large Jackson really was. They never had a real infiltration plan, or at least it wasn't discussed. Abby mentions cornering a group to force information out of them but Owen chastises this idea.
          Abby says frick it and goes off into the general direction that Owen specified. Her going off on her own set in motion her running into the armed patrol, Joel and Tommy. I dunno it's not hard to stomach personally with all things considered

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            So your argument is that they wanted to kidnap someone from a survivalist community, but traveled across the entire country without having any real plan to do so. And that Abby completely winging it and running off on her own before happening to bump into Joel, who they had no idea was actually there, isn't a coincidence?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >but traveled across the entire country without having any real plan to do so.
              It's moreso the plan changed once they saw the size of Jackson, because the problem turned into finding a needle in a haystack. Owen wants to give up, Abby becomes desperate and runs off. These happen in the cutscene
              Considering the context of the events, I don't think it's a coincidence

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      > Ellie and Abby never have a solid reason to let each other go

      A lot things characterisation is nonverbal in this game. But they abolutely get to understand each others persepctive, if only vaguely

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        That's an odd way to say "a lot of the characterisation is in my headcanon" but ok.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          It's not really a headcanon, it's an interpretation for sure because the game isn't spoonfeeding its message.
          But Ellie sees the way Abby goes straight for Lev after she is freed from the pillars. How Abby carries Lev.
          After Ellie lets go of Abby she sits in the water and says "Just take him." Yeah Ellie threatened Lev's life to force Abby to fight, but by saying that line you can infer that Ellie understands how important Lev is to Ellie.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >It's not really a headcanon, it's an interpretation
            Uhuh, how many different names are you going to come up with for it anon? 'it's not spoonfeeding its message' is such a moronic justification for "my headcanon is totally legit and valid".

            The fate of Nerevar in Morrowind is an example of a story not spoonfeeding you its message. You deciding Nerevar was totally killed by Dagoth Ur is headcanon and not an interpretation. Know the difference.

            TLOU absolutely spoonfeeds you it's message, it forces it down your throat with lengthy flash-backs and monologues, all that "reading between the lines" you're doing is just making shit up to fill the massive holes the writer left in the narrative because the narrative is just that broken, and just because you came up with a shape that fits one of the holes doesn't mean the hole was made for that fricking shape. Calling that self-indulgent tripe "an interpretation" is just a fricking disgusting way of reading a story.
            >you can infer that Ellie understands how important Lev is to Ellie.
            Which is stupid. Ellie already knows Abby has people very important to her, she SPECIFICALLY HUNTED THEM DOWN FOR THAT VERY REASON, she has no REASON to change her mind about Lev just because she actually got what she wanted, if there was some moment where it all clicked and she figured out she didn't actually want what she was doing then it came out of fricking nowhere, and you throwing all larger context out a window so a moment-to-moment story looks better than it actually is... frick me that's just so god damn stupid.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >she has no REASON to change her mind about Lev just because she actually got what she wanted,
              She threatened Lev's life to force Abby to fight to the death. She changes her mind at the beach because she realizes she's getting what she wants and it isn't helping.
              >TLOU absolutely spoonfeeds you it's message, it forces it down your throat with lengthy flash-backs and monologues
              I agree but then you say
              >all that "reading between the lines" you're doing is just making shit up to fill the massive holes the writer left in the narrative because the narrative is just that broken
              It's broken because you're too stupid to fill in those gaps for yourself. Can't pick up on emotional and contextual cues?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >you're too stupid to fill in those gaps for yourself
                Me not wanting to fill in gaps in the narrative with headcanon has little to do with intelligence, anon. Weird thing to call someone stupid over, really.
                >Can't pick up on emotional and contextual cues?
                You seeing things that aren't there, or worse, aren't supposed to be there, is the problem here buddy. "no no it's not head canon see it's totally legit because of these... uhhh... subtle queues! You just don't GET it mang!" Real plausible take there mate, you're definitely not just making shit up.
                >She changes her mind at the beach
                WHY though?
                >because she realizes she's getting what she wants and it isn't helping.
                WHY or HOW does she realise this? Just out of nowhere? "Man I really want to avenge my surrogate father who was brutally beaten to death by this absolute lunatic I now have at my mercy, but you know, I'm just not feeling it anymore"? What made her change her mind, what made her realise it isn't helping? What REASON does she have to stop even if she DID figure out it wouldn't help her grief?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                getting her fingers bitten off and having the last memory of her good times with Joel soothed her rage at the person who bit her fingers off and killed Joel

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                yeah, the flashback cutscene made her realize.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          An odd way to say "I can't pick emotional cues" too

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Non-autists can use an actor / animator's facial expressions as a way to inform and expand upon a story. A good example of this came in the form of the first game's ending. It's clear to most people who play this that Ellie is, at the very least, suspicious of the things Joel is telling her. This makes her simple response all the more puzzling / thought provoking.

          Autists meanwhile assume that Ellie's 'ok' betrays nothing about her character or the story. She believes him, and anyone who assumes otherwise is imposing their headcanon on the game.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >Hey guy water is wet
            Thanks for the irrelevant nonsense, captain obvious. Also you're completely dead wrong, autists can't pick up subtle social queues based on what might be EXPECTED of THEM, but they are usually very good at reading people when there is an actual exchange. But hey feel free to talk out of your ass spouting dumb stereotypes about a condition you actually know nothing about just so you can justify your stupid horseshit headcanon :^)

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        How? They never have a single real conversation. Ellie never finds out that Joel killed Abby's father. And Abby never accepts any fault in the idea that Ellie had a reason to come after her, she just kills Jessie, caps Tommy, and beats the shit out of a pregnant woman while blaming Ellie for showing up.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          By the end of the game at the beach it's a nonverbal, mutual understanding of moving on to put things behind the two of them. At least the scene where Abby is leading Ellie to the boats cause Ellie hesitates after cutting down Abby

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I disagree. Nothing about Ellie's hesitation or refusal to kill Abby in the end actually comes from what she knows of Abby as a character.

            Anything that's supposed to be sympathetic or relatable about Abby is known solely to the player. Not Ellie. Ellie has no reason not to kill someone who actively murdered someone she loved, when she already killed fifty other strangers that morning.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >Nothing about Ellie's hesitation or refusal to kill Abby in the end actually comes from what she knows of Abby as a character.
              Yeah I agree with that, but she refuses to kill Abby twice. Once after she cuts her down (went from bloodthirst to being led to the boats), and again as she's drowning Abby. My post was referring to the 1st while I think you're referring to the 2nd in which I agree with you

              The 2nd time though the reason for letting go of Abby was all internal conflict from Ellie

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              This. They had a good opportunity here, to have ELLIE kill Abby regardless of what the player might have wanted, if they made the story about coming to understand Abby and no longer actually wanting her dead by the end, we would have been in a neat change of perspectives by the end, where we the player are wishing Ellie to stop and not kill Abby much like Ellie felt the same way about Abby killing Joel. It would have been an excellent narrative, but for some reason Ellie channels the player having learned more about Abby and just randomly forgives her... despite everything Ellie knows about Abby being that she is a savage, insane murderer who is happy to hear her next victim is actually pregnant. Seriously that's one of the very few actual bits of dialogue between the two... "she's pregnant!" 'good'.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                In that regard, it actually would have been effective to play as Abby for the final fight as we're forced to lose to Ellie. Capping off Abby's arc by putting her in the exact same spot Joel was in. With her just trying to live her life and protect a kid she cares about, only to be completely helpless to stop this psycho who is clearly still angry about the past you're trying to escape from.

                The game could then end with Lev waking up alone alongside Abby's dead body. Watching Ellie disappear into the distance, and swearing upon more pointless revenge. The cycle continues.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >Nothing about Ellie's hesitation or refusal to kill Abby in the end actually comes from what she knows of Abby as a character.
              Yeah I agree with that, but she refuses to kill Abby twice. Once after she cuts her down (went from bloodthirst to being led to the boats), and again as she's drowning Abby. My post was referring to the 1st while I think you're referring to the 2nd in which I agree with you

              The 2nd time though the reason for letting go of Abby was all internal conflict from Ellie

              This. They had a good opportunity here, to have ELLIE kill Abby regardless of what the player might have wanted, if they made the story about coming to understand Abby and no longer actually wanting her dead by the end, we would have been in a neat change of perspectives by the end, where we the player are wishing Ellie to stop and not kill Abby much like Ellie felt the same way about Abby killing Joel. It would have been an excellent narrative, but for some reason Ellie channels the player having learned more about Abby and just randomly forgives her... despite everything Ellie knows about Abby being that she is a savage, insane murderer who is happy to hear her next victim is actually pregnant. Seriously that's one of the very few actual bits of dialogue between the two... "she's pregnant!" 'good'.

              What I would have wanted was for them to have only one boat at the end, instead of two. With Ellie forcing them to leave together as a group at gunpoint, instead of going their separate ways.

              Then, with both of them half dead and sitting across from one another. Ellie can actually ask, "Why?" And then we could see the two lead characters just have a human conversation for the first time in the whole story. Ellie remembering Joel. Abby remembering her father. Whether Ellie chooses to shoot her after that, or they go their separate ways, the choice stems from actually looking each other in the face and talking to the person whose life they ruined, instead of just blindly hating or killing a total stranger.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'd argue the game needed some actual fricking closure but then pseudo-intellectual muppets would come in and say "hurrrr that's the whole point revenge doesn't offer closure see the writing is so very clever" So instead I'll go with the fact that the story really wasn't about anything. It's just a complete waste of time narratively 'revenge bad' is a childish message no matter how much you coat it in subtext, awkward glances and complicated expressions.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          > Ellie never finds out that Joel killed Abby's father
          In the context of the world and knowing Joels past, its easy to deduce why someone tracked him down. No need to know EXACTLY the who and why.

          > And Abby never accepts any fault in the idea that Ellie had a reason to come after her, she just kills Jessie, caps Tommy, and beats the shit out of a pregnant woman while blaming Ellie for showing up.
          She instantly regrets the moment she got her revenge on Joel.
          This is I say the game relies a lot on subtext and nonverbal cues. People are just used to Japanese slop where every character does 4 lines of expository dialogue for every change in motivation

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >She instantly regrets the moment she got her revenge on Joel.
            Her face goes through a bunch of emotions right after she kills Joel, none of them positive or satisfying. Meanwhile her friends are fighting in the background and she's just lost in the moment. I'd agree that she regrets it immediately but I'm sure she would do it again cause hey, Joel killed her dad.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Yeah regret may not be the right word but you can tell that she's conflicted. It didn't give her the satisfaction that she hoped for, kinda like a post nut clarity

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >She instantly regrets the moment she got her revenge on Joel.
            She didn't regret shit. It just didn't give her the peace she wanted, hence her continued nightmares.

            The thing that ends the nightmare, is when she actually helps two kids instead of blindly killing them. But that still doesn't show any remorse or understanding for Ellie and why she did what she did. Because Abby continues to hunt Ellie down after realizing she's in town, and would have happily murdered a pregnant woman in front of her if not for Lev telling her not to.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >Joel ends up slaughtering a bunch of psychos he used to work for who want to kill a young girl for moronic reasons
              >Abby ends up slaughtering a bunch of psychos he used to work for who want to kill a young girl for moronic reasons
              kino...

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              > Because Abby continues to hunt Ellie down after realizing she's in town, and would have happily murdered a pregnant woman in front of her if not for Lev telling her not to.

              Did you miss the part where she saw the boddies of her pregnant friend and her lover dead by the hand of Ellie?
              I think both were too far gone to forgive each other, that would have been corny af. They did however come to the comclusion that further bloodshed is senseless

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >the boddies of her pregnant friend and her lover dead by the hand of Ellie
                Those frickers volunteered for Abby's cross country murder mission without knowing shit about Joel too.

                Didn't even have the balls to make Ellie killing them a deliberate choice. It was just her reaction to them going for their weapons.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                They were ex Fireflys too. Not like they didn't have any motive in hating Joel. Owen is the sole reason Ellie is still alive in the first place.

                What the frick are you talking about? You can "play" TLOU for free by watching a playthrough on twitch or youtube. Now that the TV show is out it is even more redundant.

                It is the reason we don't buy snoy games and their consoles and ignore the "exclusives" meme, they aren't legitimate games and have no engaging gameplay.

                Play the game poorgay

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            This comment made me get the hate this game gets here. Expo dumping Japs explaining every single thing is the only way autists actually understand anything. Having to recognize through non-verbal cues that Abby was almost immediately horrified by what she'd done, and continued to gradually lose it because of the regret simply wasn't made clear enough. This regret drove her behaviour changes throughout the game, such as helping Lev and fighting her former brothers in arms. It was redemption, saving a life to make up for the one she took. Because this isn't explained periodically in increasingly infantile dialogue likely means 90% of the autists here just... Didn't get it. Reading lots of the complaints "WHY DID SHE DO THESE THINGS" is proof people never actually recognized the internal conflict of the character that cropped up immediately completing her revenge. Thanks anon for the clarity.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Nice bait. So you’re allowed to get revenge if you’re sowwy after it. Excellent writing. Read a book.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I read the Bible, if I kill someone and ask my fictional friend for forgiveness then I'm ok!

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Rekt. Take my upvote

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            This comment made me get the hate this game gets here. Expo dumping Japs explaining every single thing is the only way autists actually understand anything. Having to recognize through non-verbal cues that Abby was almost immediately horrified by what she'd done, and continued to gradually lose it because of the regret simply wasn't made clear enough. This regret drove her behaviour changes throughout the game, such as helping Lev and fighting her former brothers in arms. It was redemption, saving a life to make up for the one she took. Because this isn't explained periodically in increasingly infantile dialogue likely means 90% of the autists here just... Didn't get it. Reading lots of the complaints "WHY DID SHE DO THESE THINGS" is proof people never actually recognized the internal conflict of the character that cropped up immediately completing her revenge. Thanks anon for the clarity.

            >She instantly regrets the moment she got her revenge on Joel.
            >Having to recognize through non-verbal cues that Abby was almost immediately horrified by what she'd done
            Yes. This is correct, she was totally shown to not feel any elation upon killing Joel.

            >Non-verbal cues
            This is where I'm kinda not feeling it. Except for the immediate moment after, she really kinda just goes about her life until she encounters the Scars. We're told constantly that she's the best killer among the WLF, which really comes into conflict with how much Joel's death affected her.

            I understand that saving the kids and hearing Owen's story about the tired Scar ready to die and the subsequent sex were the things that kickstarted Abby's journey back to feeling some kind of humanity. But between this and first taking control of Abby we're just subjected to this marinade of Abby's life for which we aren't really given a reason to give a shit. Like are we supposed to feel some kind of karma that her love life is going to shit in retribution for killing Joel? I get it, being spoonfed emotions is fricking lame, I agree. But I don't think Abby changing was gradual it just kinda happened because she chased after Owen and got hijacked by the Scars. Don't get me wrong it was wonderful to see the WLF compound and stuff but it was really fricking hard, actually impossible for me, to give a shit about Abby watching her have this passive aggressive spat with Mel. I mean who the frick cares.

            The thing about Joel in the first game was that you really got to see a lighter side of him as he relayed life in the old world to Ellie with ice cream trucks and football and coffee. I didn't get that with Abby, I found very few reasons to give a frick about her and she needed that help. She needed something; she needed better bantz with her Spanish pal I don't know. Something beyond the dog petting.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Cont.

              And I want to add, I wasn't fricking feeling Ellie's whole life leading up to taking control of Abby either.

              It felt like total ass that Ellie was able to kinda go on this stroll through WLF territory and serendipitous somehow always being one step behind Tommy and somehow stumble across Jesse. Yunno, the player is in a low state fricking throw us a bone or something. Don't get me wrong I liked Dana, she was fun and sassy but it just felt wrong that she would follow Ellie to the ends of the Earth just like that and that Jesse would follow as well. I wish the team felt more like a team and that only really happened when they were regrouped at the theater and Tommy and Jesse were gabbing on about israeliteellery.

              And Dana's pregnancy. This is just me but pregnancy is just the most cliche and cheap feeling-grab in fiction involving women. I think it's tacky as frick that it's used at all like peak drama can only be achieve when a baby is involved. It's the fricking apocalypse, how the frick is it at all acceptable that these people can keep a secret like being pregnant from one another especially when they're crossing two fricking states on horse. It's like these fricking people have never gone backpacking before do you know how much fricking food and shit you need to cross two fricking states? It was just too much by the end, my suspension of disbelief was too challenged all throughout right up to the moment Ellie felt that she had to kick the shit out of Abby one last time.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              I'll be honest, while I don't think her character development is as bad as a lot of people say, I also don't think you're entirely wrong. They definitely could have done more to make you empathize and understand her character. I don't think it was bad, or even significantly lacking but it still wasn't close to how they built up Joel.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Look, the one thing we cannot say about Abby is that they didn't try to flesh out her character. They absolutely spent a ton of effort showing us who she was. The problem is that who she was wasn't memorable, like if we took away the fact we're all pissed at her for killing Joel, we're left with a person who is struggling at life. She's not broing it up with Spanish and she's not friends or catty with Mel and I don't know why but the Nerf target shooting thing with Owen just entirely fell flat for me. Best Abby was when she was young in the flashbacks, that was little girl Abby struggling with life.

                You know what they had to do, they had to make Abby's crew a crew. They needed to put the focus on the Salt Lake crew and make us love them and how they loved Abby's dad and the player learning to like them would transfer over to Abby. But instead, there's fricking Jeffery Wright just showing up because it's like Naughty Dog is playing celebrity welfare. And all these ex-Firefly people who are supposed to be tight and shit they just die. We had a whole game where Ellie and Joel hang out and for half the second game we have this cast of unknowns be less interesting than Sam and Henry before eating shit.

                In my head I pretend the game is just a movie. It's just all the moments with Ellie and Joel are together. Starting from where an unnamed assailant smashes his head in with Ellie screaming and cuts to Ellie with Tommy, Ellie's birthday, to Salt Lake, to the kiss with Dana, and finally to coffee. And I'll tell you why, because those are the scenes where Ellie is Ellie. And not this cold sad piece of shit with the life sucked out of her even before Joel dies. And it ends as ambiguously as the first game, who knows if the people who kill Joel kill Ellie immediately afterwards. What matters is that at the end they weren't mad at each other; that is the silver-lining in this gargantuan waste of time.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >and make us love them and how they loved Abby's dad
                >love a guy who died because he insisted on being able to kill an unconscious girl
                The problem with Abby and her friends is Joel didn't do anything wrong. Abby had no cause to get revenge for her monster of a father. His friends should have been mad at him and not the guy who decided that no, it is actually not okay to kill a girl who wouldn't have been able to consent to the operation even if she had been awake to learn about it at any point.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Excellent take. 100% agreed.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This was basically yahtzees take, there's no character arc for either of them and by the end everyone is just a despicable piece of shit. They're not interesting to watch. Ellie becomes a slasher movie villain and abby is just a vicious roid ranging butthole

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I suppose because it fricks over a bittersweet and ambiguous ending that I would rather they have left alone.
      I pretty much agree with everything you said. This is what hurt me the most. The ending of the first game carried so much power. Ruining this ambiguity and compounding it with a weak-ass story in the second game was salting the wound. I mean, fine, I understand that you can't leave the money on the table but for fricks sake write a decent story.

      >Ellie and Abby never have a solid reason to let each other go
      This was my primary issue. This contrivance was absolutely without question the worst part about the whole game. The fact that Abby and Ellie didn't pulp one another when they had the chance was pure and total nonsense. There was no fricking reason for Abby to leave Ellie alive after killing Joel, no reason for Abby to not kill everyone in the theatre, and finally no reason for Ellie to not kill Abby at the end. How the frick can the story be about searing hot revenge when there's no fricking revenge?!

      I'm going to entirely avoid the second season of the show. I fricking loved the first season because it just enhanced everything we loved about the first game, it was like 100% more feeling and content. But the way Neil has expressed zero reflection about the reception of the second game, I'm not going to touch that shit.

      Just want to say, if you want a story about revenge, watch The Prestige. It's a palate cleanser for the awfulness that was Last of Us 2.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This was basically yahtzees take, there's no character arc for either of them and by the end everyone is just a despicable piece of shit. They're not interesting to watch. Ellie becomes a slasher movie villain and abby is just a vicious roid ranging butthole

      Abby does have a bit of an arc that's supposed to be a reflection of Joel's. i.e. She killed a bunch of people, then decided to take care of a kid instead.

      It's just kind of funny that the end result of that shows that Abby didn't come to feel any regret for Ellie of her own volition. It just feels like sparing her again is a means of appeasing her new kid. Otherwise she was perfectly happy to hear that Dina was pregnant while she was prepping to slit her throat out of spite.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >It's just kind of funny that the end result of that shows that Abby didn't come to feel any regret for Ellie of her own volition. It just feels like sparing her again is a means of appeasing her new kid. Otherwise she was perfectly happy to hear that Dina was pregnant while she was prepping to slit her throat out of spite.

        N-no your japanese anime shit with the exposition made you unable to understand! She felt remorse but it was so subtle not even Druckmann got it...

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        The whole Abby arc is a pastiche of Joel's journey towards his recuperation to humanity
        >part 1
        >a trafficker dehumanized by war is entrusted with the transport of a child
        >during the trip he recovers his humanity and decides to make a great sacrifice.

        >part 2
        >the daughter of a doctor killed by the trafficker decides to embark on a journey of revenge that ends with the loss of her humanity.
        >realizing the loss of her soul, she decides to adopt a couple of children to regain her lost humanity.

        the writers of part two knew they could never write a story as good as the previous version, so they refactored the premise of part one in an artificial way, parasitizing, forcing and twisting in a very incompetent way the best components of the predecessor, they sprayed and prayed and the results are embarrassing

  54. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Abby gets saved by Joel, guy who wronged her once years ago for arguably good reasons
    >doesn't give a shit, tortures him to death
    >Abby gets saved by seraphites, crazy irredeemable cultists who have been warring with her friends and allies for years
    >whole world view changed, wtf violence bad now
    it's shit

  55. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It would have been better if Abby wasn't a Firefly but the daughter of some rando Joel killed before he met Ellie to steal food or whatever. That would do a better job painting the "hero who's a villain in someone else's story" picture which they were clearly trying to get people to see by having Abby's arc with Lev mirror Joel looking for redemption in Ellie. But since they made her a Firefly it was way too easy to defend Joel since most people agree he made the right call at the end of the first game.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      What's funny is that I wasn't sure that Joel made the right call when I first played the original game. But the second game changed my mind, because it helped me realize that Joel actually killed with reason, to save a life. While everyone claiming he was a monster or a b***h that had it coming is just being suicidally vindictive and torturing someone to death for their own petty satisfaction.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        and if you follow the game up until that point you realize the fireflies are a bunch of frick ups
        >knocks out unarmed man performing CPR
        >refuse to get consent
        and then the stupidest thing in my opinion, they shouldn't have had these if they wanted fireflies to look competent
        >make collectables dog tags of fireflies
        >you learn they did stupid shit to die

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        This. Abby's dad would be alive if he didn't try to take on Joel with the same scalpel he was going to use to slice open Ellie's head with. Abby traveling across the country to kill a man who is no threat to her and torturing him to death with no restraint AFTER he saved her life is not in any way justifiable and is explicitly evil.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Not only that. She does it in front of his (not)daughter and takes extra glee in it on top of it.
          Everything makes more sense when you just view Abby as a low functioning psychopath completely incapable of understanding anyone's feelings.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Whats weird is the same people who so flippantly say joel deserved to die defend abby and ellie’s actions despite joel being an objectively better person than them by the end of part 2. Joel’s actions stemmed from care, their actions stemmed from hatred and a desire for revenge

  56. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't think Abby killing Joel in an act of revenge really informs it as karma. Joel was never really noted for killing out of anger, he did so out of survival, practicality as a criminal or in the case of Ellie love. You could accuse him of hypocrisy, small minded selfishness, the ends justified the means when he was a hunter raiding poor schmucks for supplies in the early days but he refuses what might those measures from having to be taken. Abbie killing him years later because he killed daddy is a totally different set of circumstances. Karmic ending for joel is getting shot by a random raiding party.

  57. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I'll be honest.
    I love Joel and I'm glad he died in such a bad way.
    I hated it, the setup, the other people involved and I hate Abby most of all.
    Because I hate it so much I can simply ignore it and pretend it never even happened and that the whole story in 2 is not canon.
    If Joel had died in a respectable manner, because of an actually good character, with a sensible explanation it would have been worse because I would have no other choice but to accept that was it and Joel was gone for good, or even worse, maybe feel for the person who's fricking killing motherfricking Joel.

    But that's not the case, so I can continue hating Abby knowing this "story" was just Drunkman getting free reign to write the shittiest story he could come up with and someone decided to make it into a game and slap the TLoU name on it but has no canon bearing on the story.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Ah, the Alien 3 solution.

  58. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TLOU2 is literally the Pain Arc of Naruto and the fact that people unironically treat it and Cuckmann like the second coming of Christ is what is really embarrassing.
    Even had the events that led up to Joel's death not been comically moronic on his part, it wouldn't have mattered. The "morality" of the story is childish and the fact he layers his favorite racemixed lesbians archetype on top of it won't change that fact.

  59. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The act itself could have been done well.

    However, that would require the game to be restructured top-to-bottom and not be marketed on the original duo being in the game.

    If we started with a similar pre-apocalypse of Abby and her dad surviving, then get to "present day" Abby hunting for the man who killed her father we would be primed to feel more invested in her story.
    It would have to be a twist that the man she was hunting was Joel. Then it would actually be surprising and conflicting.

    As it is, we get a beloved character getting killed after catching a terminal case of the stupids and forgetting his own advice from the first game.
    We're then primed to hate Abby, regardless of what her sob story is.
    This is further undercut by Druckmann's terrible attempts to retcon the Fireflies into being right. Because that just makes the sequel look even worse.

  60. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's just MGS2 2.

  61. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel's death was fine. Playing as Abby right after was not.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Playing as Abby right after was not.
      You play as Abby 12-15 hours later. A bit over the length of the first game

  62. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >white straight male gets beat to death

    Real subtle, Cuckman. Just say you hate straight people, you aren't hiding your hate speech anymore you fricking lgbt bastard.

  63. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The game could've been shakespearean in quality, and I'd still discard it as trash because it made the fatal mistake of asking me to care about these video game characters. They are nothing but pixels on a screen, they are not real people. Therefore, I have no reason to care about them. My desire to sympathize with them only comes from what they can offer from a gameplay perspective. I felt sadder when Tellah died in FF4, because he at least had a strong array of magic that you don't get access to again, until almost the end of the game. I couldn't care less about his gay relationship with the Bard or his dead kid, his actual gameplay impact was all that mattered.

    When these obnoxious and stuck up hollywood snobs get this through their heads, then we'll talk.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      can't imagine you when you watch movies or read books, you brainlet frick

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Let me give you a preview then.

        >movie/book introduces character
        >they do NOTHING through the whole story
        >but the narrator constantly jerks them off as amazing
        >end of the book, they've still done nothing, but we're supposed to love and worship the ground they're on

        How about you give me a reason to care about your special snowflake character? Maybe a well directed action scene or a well written personal moment that gives them introspective. Not mindless schlock that exists solely so you can jerk off your pet character. You've failed to get my attention, so your product is trash.

  64. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    the whole sequel was unnecessary when the story had a perfect final part in the first game without any plan for a second game in mind.
    but here comes sony - make a second tlou
    >frick we need something to happen to make a story
    >kill joel, his arc was finished anyway lol
    >also make a revenge plot with a two sided coin backstory
    i have no idea how this felt natural to anybody or how people think 'wow thats fricking great'.
    MGR:R did revenge better.
    Naruto did revenge better.
    John Rambo did revenge better.
    Kill Bill did revenge better.
    Even the Equalizer did it better.
    That shit is how a woman imagines the perfect revenge plot. Literally no person on earth ever would act like that after what happened until that point.
    It is dumb as shit and should have never happened. Thanks Sony.

  65. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was brutal, painful, pointless and dragged on much longer than it needed to.
    Perfect death for Joel.

  66. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    imo it would've been more interesting if Abby had no idea who killed her dad and asked Joel and Ellie to help find the person until they all realize it. Still fricking dumb I'm "supposed" to be empathic to Abby and I honestly never will. The character and entire story is just set up in a stupid fricking way. A simple, "please, I have a daughter!", line from the doctor could've patched up my grievances. But nope, instead this random NPC had a daughter all of a sudden, were you expectations SUBVERTED?. Joel bad, be empathic, actions have consequences, vengeance bad etc. Amazing 10/10, Neil's Magnus Opus. They should've asked the Mass Effect team for tips on "actions having consequences" because this was just fricking stupid. OR MAYBE MAKE ABBY MARLENE'S DAUGHTER THAT WE DIDN'T KNOW SHE HAD SO AT LEAST SHES FROM A NAMED CHARACTER WE KNOW FROM THE PAST GAME. NOT SOME RANDOM STUPID DOCTOR.

  67. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why does Joel never defend himself when Ellie finds out about the fireflies and the vaccine? He just mopes and apologizes all the time. Ellie knows they didn't ask her before they were going to kill her right?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Joel is not good with words. The best anti-heroes have shit communication skills

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I didn't like LOU2, but I didn't actually mind how they handled the idea of Ellie being angry at Joel.

      Whether or not she was happy to still be alive, Ellie had pinned all her hopes on the idea of this cure that would just magically fix everything. And beyond being told that it was all for nothing, Joel did the same thing that the Fireflies did and made the choice for her. No matter who won, Ellie had no say in the matter.

      So feeling like she was denied her chance to save the world and that she was lied to for years, she's convinced that she would rather have died a martyr if it meant that all the suffering up until then would have had actual meaning.

  68. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I haven't played these games but considering the majority of the thread is
    >No it's bad because I don't care about Abby
    I'm going to assume everyone are just being fricking brainlets

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This is a video game, not a movie. Stop asking me to care about a character, as if that justifies the game's poor quality.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Do you want to talk about the gameplay? You can tell us what you didn't like about it. Maybe even post your playtime.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        The main b***hing was about the story. Even the haters admit the gameplay is top tier

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Do you want to talk about the gameplay? You can tell us what you didn't like about it. Maybe even post your playtime.

          >TLOU
          >good gameplay
          oh boy I sure do love COWADOODY but with zombies and walk-and-talk segments. Tell me again how it's top tier game design to drag me through a synagogue and lecture me about the 6 million, when we're supposed to be surviving a zombie apocalypse.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Great. Thanks for your answer

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Mmh dunno maybe play the game lll

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          What the frick are you talking about? You can "play" TLOU for free by watching a playthrough on twitch or youtube. Now that the TV show is out it is even more redundant.

          It is the reason we don't buy snoy games and their consoles and ignore the "exclusives" meme, they aren't legitimate games and have no engaging gameplay.

  69. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The only good to come out of TLOU2 was seeing Cuckman seethe, his ((subversive)) magnus opus was leaked and mocked all across the globe

  70. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    hack writers have the audience 2 steps ahead of the characters, good writers have the characters 2 steps ahead of the audience.

  71. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The marketing was a lie. You can't make Joel look older in the trailers and then blindside your audience by killing him off by a Literal Who and not except backlash. It could have absolutely been handled better.

    >But how could it have been handled better?
    Pick literally any other way, dude.

  72. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    THEY"RE GENOCIDING THE WHITE MAN REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  73. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The problem with the second Last of Us wasn't Joel dying, wasn't Abby, wasn't Gameplay or whatever.
    It was the narrative.
    Ellie literally murdered all of Abby's friends, chased her down and for what? Nothing? What a shit build up. A classic revenge story is better than having no pay off in the end. But no, instead they tried to make you feel sorry for Abby with the most boring 8 hour flashback sequence in existence for a dogshit payoff.
    Ellie should of murdered Abby and that little Black person in the boat. Frick this game.

  74. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel’s death (re-resenting end of white male power0 at the hands of a deluded white woman is poetic.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Representing*

  75. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You have to respect the audience
    Joel and the player EARNED his ending in Part 1.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Respect the audience by not challenging their emotions in any way

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >challenging
        homosexual israelite way of saying offending

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          > Offended by a fictional characters death lmao. Fricking fragile sheltered middle class homosexuals hope you get nuked by Russia

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >hey bro I raped your mom
            >lol it's just an erotic fiction tho
            >why so mad?!
            Eat shit israelite.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >you see that character you liked?
        >well hes fricking deeeeeead!
        It worked out well for Prototype tbh. Its why Dr Cuckmann needs to push out another remake for both games because he really white women'd the dog on this one.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Worked well for Prototype
          I thought people hated Mercer getting turned evil so some dindu could be the new main character

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah, dropped it to 'not even gonna pirate' status when I heard about that

  76. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What really bothers me about this game is how much of a loser Ellie is

    >mad with the guy that saved her life numerous times for years, saying the dumb sadboy shit of "huuurrr you should have let them kill me duuurrr"
    >fails to save him
    >get cucked, still assumes the kid
    >goes after Joel's murderer, spares nobody on her way
    >when finally reaches Abby... Get fricking rekt hard time, even her girl got curbstomped, and only survived because of the pleas of a troony
    >her ego got hurt so bad she sacrifices her new family
    >abandons everything for revenge
    >still got mutilated by an Abby that had been starving while tied to a pole in the sun for days
    >fails on her quest, AGAIN

    How the frick can an MC be this pathetic. If Ellie was a dude, it would become the new face of shaming redditors and basedboys

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      now that you mention it, it was pretty pathetic and onions how she pulled her knife out in the final fight even when abby was completely atrophied and shrivelled up into stick figure.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Ellie already had a stab wound in her gut. Using a knife was fine considering that she could have just shot her to begin with.

  77. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Game about revenge being bad
    >Retcon the Fireflies being unambiguous buttholes
    >Abby doesn't get to go on her rampage only to realize that she lacked details and she got so many people killed for nothing
    Kinda defeats the purpose for her to be treated super sympathetic by the narrative

  78. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They should have not shown it in the beginning like that. If anything they should have shown joel ellie and tommy getting held captive then only tommy and ellie are shown escaping. They could leave it ambiguous, like we know joel is probably dead but we don’t know how or who killed him exactly. Until towards the end where we play as abby in a flashback and actually kill joel ourselves.

    But instead they show it from jump street and everyone hates abby. Itd be like if they introduced joel by showing him shooting up a hospital without any context.

  79. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I wonder how the show will handle him dying, or if they'll just like perma-cripple him instead because Pedro Pascal.

    The show already improved a lot on the first game(though I feel like they pulled back just a little bit too much on clicker action) and I think they can do the same with Part II

  80. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    These games are terribly written. Same as the series. Its ok if you disagree..it just means you have terrible taste.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      name a flaw

  81. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The problem was it was terribly executed in a game with a lot worse writing in it, so it got more attention

  82. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    i dont know a single playstation owner that has finished this game

  83. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The real patrician take is that Abby was the best part of the game and her segment was much better than the constant wearying edgy revenge stuff in Ellie's. Even with the troony character it was better than the first half.

    The end was kino

  84. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Will TV normies sneethe as hard as gaymers about the golf tournament?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Probably not. The difference is TV normies are just watching Joel whereas the gamers think they ARE Joel. Gamers took it as a personal insult. Same as the Spec Ops bullshit.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >gamers think they ARE Joel
        Do americans really? I've never understood this. Sure you play as him, but he's still just a character in a story. I guess I'd sorta understand it just a little bit if the main character in the sequel to a create-your-own-character RPG (like Skyrim or something) got offed like that, but even then it's a stretch.

  85. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don’t think Joel did anything wrong he did what he had to do to save Ellie and I hate the story of the second game but I do respect that they had the balls to kill him off. I don’t like that they wrote his character to be so careless especially after everything we know about him in the first game. I like revenge stories and I like the idea of a character people love being killed because it really fricks with the audiences heads but the way they went about it was dogshit. One of my favorite movies is the departed because pretty much everyone you like dies in the end. It has potential to really twist things up but the way cuckman did it was not only disrespectful but stupid and laced with woke bullshit that I hate.

  86. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Two things. One the game couldn't have leaked early. People hated on it 5 months out and decided nothing they could have done would change their minds.

    Two, Abby's part needed to be less trying to retcon her dad into someone else and also maybe you should have started the game as Abby. I think in hindsight, trying the MGS2 approach fricked them. Imagine no Ellie or Joel in marketing, you play Abby leading up to Joel's death and her entire part back in Seattle. Then you swap to Ellie back at the start and play her whole section.

  87. 1 year ago
    Anonymous
  88. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    why did the first game end with a choice but not the second one? like why couldn’t you choose between killing or sparing abby if nothing else

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Cuckman didn’t want to give people the satisfaction they deserved. Abby should have definitely died at the end

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Woman logic. Druck's co-writer, a woman with the last name of Gross lmao, thought that Ellie wouldn't kill Abby because she's just not that kind of person, which created the scenario where she changed her mind for no discernable reason several times at the very end.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yeah of course she wouldn’t Ellie is a Libra so that’s totally not in he nature to do something like that, unless mercury is in retrograde of course

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I think you meant to say unless uranus is in gatorade

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            No thank you it’s rather cold

  89. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I'm curious to see how normies react to ellie being a doggo killer and poor abby and her fear of heights and love of trans rights

  90. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Just needed to be shifted around a bit.
    Having it at the start and then being told to like abby was so moronic i wondered if it was done on purpose.

  91. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't care about both games, memes were glorious. Btw is multiplayer DLC out already?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It hasn't even been shown off. Neil said we'll see it later this year, which probably means it won't be out until next year anyway or at least very late this year.

  92. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joels death is a minor footnote in an overall disaster
    The story is paced like shit
    The entire story is just meant to lead up to a "revenge bad" plot point but it feels incredibly wasted when you have a protagonist that's done so much fricked shit that they shouldn't give a damn about revenge being bad

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >The entire story is just meant to lead up to a "revenge bad"
      really weird how israelites always push this plot point, eh?

  93. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TLOU2 unironically has a ton of good ideas that are all wasted on absolutely fricking pointless narrative

  94. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The entire Lev subplot completely destroyed the pacing of the game, like it feels like it was included in a later script rewrite strictly for the purpose of having something extra progressive so Neil can make a point about troons. I literally thought at one point in the game, for a brief moment, that a character was just going to look at the camera and say 'trans rights'

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Wasn't that added in because they realized they didn't have a reason for Abby to dip

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      and it pissed off the trannies cos "we get defined by trauma for your entertainment wawawa"

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Well they're right. This is why you don't get morons trying to give moral lessons.

  95. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    there are no issues here
    this game is a masterpiece
    gamers don't have the palette for this kind of shit

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous
  96. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It’s fine. First game started with a strong death. There was no one you could kill in the second one but him or Ellie to achieve a similar effect.

    It’s still better than just having TLoU 1: Part2 all over again because that’s boring.

  97. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Could it have been handled much better. And Abby as a character should have more development, not just a short and stupid flash back.
    In terms of story, I can't find any solid reason for Abby story arc. She's just a NPC we are forced to play, there's nothing interesting in her play through. It's like she's there to cause troubles for everyone around her. Troubles, not conflicts that developed into a story.

  98. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why are they so ugly

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      For the same reason literal gay pedophiles in drag have been whining for six months about weebshit and calling all weebs e-girlcons on twitter.

  99. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I think its placement at the beginning and the structure of various flashbacks throughout the game is excellent storytelling. It gets the player 100% onboard with Ellie's quest at first, only for their relationship with the player character to start becoming more complicated as the story goes on. It also plays interesting games with what the player knows vs what Ellie knows vs what the player thinks Ellie knows- the result is something close to an unreliable narrator effect. It's obvious how much thought and care went into that.
    As for the actual logistics of his death, I never had an issue with it, but maybe they could have tweaked a couple minor things that some people objected to (i.e. make Joel+Tommy a bit more hesitant to share their names).

  100. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel's death is handled just fine and if you got pissed at it, the story did its job. If you think Joel should have lived, you haven't been paying attention. That said, the real nonsense is when Abby spares Ellie at the theater and Ellie spares Abby at the beach.

  101. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Honestly I didn't give a shit about Joel dying, what I cared was Ellie being moronic at the end. A better ending for me would have been Ellie killing Abby and then killing herself after realizing she feels nothing and lost everything in the process.
    We would also be rid of these shitty characters forever.

  102. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    To be honest I don't know how people stomach israeli media anymore.

  103. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You don't give a protagonist a sudden death, only made to build up a new character as a villain. The reason people were mad at this is exactly the same reason why people are still mad at Han Solo's death, or even Johnny Cage's death in Mortal Kombat Annihilation. It's cheap, copout writing and a tired and unpopular cliche.

  104. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's over

  105. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I like the gameplay a lot and hate the story. Same thing happened with BOTW. I skipped both stories and just enjoyed the gameplay.

  106. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Good thread.

  107. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Pacing was just atrocious. You have jumps forwards and backwards in time and flashbacks from years ago haphazardly thrown in. It's confusing and jarring. If they wanted to do the Abby shit they should have gone the mgs2 route and swapped protagonists, playing as Abby up until she kills Joel, then HOL UP she's a villain, that would have been a better hook than LMAO JOEL DED BOO HOO. The game also has like 3 different endings where you could have turned it off and said good enough. The last chapter in particular is like tlou part 3: even worse pacing, and that whole section of the game seems to exist for the sole purpose of contriving a scenerio in which ellie and Abby can have a metal gear solid fistfight on equal grounds. The whole game is self insert fanfiction tier where this ridiculous Mary Sue (troony sue?) character just shows up and beats the shit out of all established characters. It plays like some weird fricking dude's personal fetish porn. Abby isn't even a terrible character, you're just made to hate her and then forced to play as her after you already want her dead. That creates a disconnection between what the character wants and what the player wants. Whole Abby section is just a slog because you hate her and all her homosexual companions and don't care what happens to them. Tyler's stream was a perfect representation of what the average player felt playing through this crap. Building anger and mounting frustration. Even though gameplay is more interesting in her part.

    I liked the village, the museum flashback and the part where ellie beat that negress to death with a pipe

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Also that hospital confrontation scene was the dumbest most contrived shit I've ever seen. They should have had ellie just go through Joel's stuff after he dies and find Marlene's tape recorder or something. Maybe Joel would have hung onto it in case he wanted to tell her the truth one day. Seems like something he might do.

      The whole problem though is how outlandishly israeli part 2 is. Part 1 worked because the plot and the universe of the game never passed judgement on any of the characters. Part 2 is nothing but retribution porn. The two main characters are being punished for the end of part 1 less than three hours into part 2,like they literally couldn't wait to ruin their shit

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Also that hospital confrontation scene was the dumbest most contrived shit I've ever seen. They should have had ellie just go through Joel's stuff after he dies and find Marlene's tape recorder or something. Maybe Joel would have hung onto it in case he wanted to tell her the truth one day. Seems like something he might do.

        That would have been much much better

  108. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The game was very good, it went on a bit too long, i'd have rathered they shortened both of the 3 day segments. People seething about Joel never made sense to me.

  109. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was abysmal. Bruce Straley would have told him it was moronic and to take a vacation.

  110. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    How does the whole "break the cycles of violence" thing work when Abby starts killing people again in 3?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Abby should have died from her wounds, she was severely dehydrated and got stabbed multiple times

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Because that whole ideology is made from the person who started the initial wrong wanting off whenever things get too hot. Abbie's dad was working for a terrorist group and knowingly lied to a little girl so they could experiment on her and take her life. Only someone in this position would start going "NOOOO look at all we've lost" when someone starts killing all their friends and family members in response to their misguided revenge. It's only a cycle if you let the motherfricker who made the initial mistake get revenge for the righteous justice they were granted.

  111. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    As much as people meme on joel’s death it isn’t the biggest problem with the games story, its just executed sloppily. There is absolutely no reason why ellie would let abby live in the end, the game treats ellie as if she has the perspective of the player and has seen everything abby has gone through so she can sympathize with her. The endiny legitimately makes no sense. I like the idea of her not being able to play the guitar because of the missing finger though, thats well done.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Just use your other hand and/or just play simpler songs, problem solved.

  112. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Everything about TLOU2 is just a worse version of Nier Automata as far as themes go
    Ironic since the first game also collided with OG Nier's themes

  113. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    There only exists one person named Joel OMEGALUL.

  114. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I never played the game but I knew exactly the reason why ND did this: Shock Value.

    It's blatant and pandering.

  115. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Y'know him dying? Sure. Fine. It's a common thing. Out with the old, in with the new generation. I definitely thought some other Sony dad game would do the same. But really my biggest gripe is they fricking did fan fiction levels of writing to invent the surgeon as a person and character, and making his daughter a spiteful b***h. Which sure but... The surgeon was a basic NPC. They wrote nothing for him in the original game. It's like if I decided to write a story about the son of a soldier killed by the dragon born come to kill him. It'll always end up as shit as Hunt Down The Freeman. It's fan fiction. The game ended at 1 and im leaving it there

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      That might have been acceptable had they literally not reconned the man holding a scalpel and threatening to stab Joel like a moron if he didn't get the chance to cut up a little girl.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Isn't there a failstate where he kills you if you just walk up to him?

  116. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    There's way better ways to make Joel's death more impactful and meaningful, yet they went with one of the worst ways to do it. I was suspecting his death will be at the very beginning by the things Cuckman had been saying in the interviews. Even their trailers showing Joel looked and sounded like fake or hallucinations. However, in the end whole game was pretty much garbage of a writing, Twilight fan-fic written by 13 year old Church virgin. Even if gameplay, music, graphics were solid, you can't say story doesn't matter because it does matter a lot in these games.

    Thank God I did paid couple dollarinos for it. Rip to full price and preorder cucks.

  117. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Killing off the main character is okay, having a "revenge bad" theme is also okay, but it just wasn't written well. The whole game had mediocre writing at best, but I'd say the same thing about the first game too
    I have no idea why Ganker suddenly started caring about TLoU after this came out, probably just the culture war morons

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I have no idea why Ganker suddenly started caring about TLoU after this came out
      The Last of Us was not hated when it came out. Yeah, there were people who shat on the "movie game" but most of Ganker actually likes movie games so they were hardly the majority.

  118. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >was Joels death good writing or could it have been handled better?
    the whole point of the scene and the game as a whole is to be reactionary bait, it never even attempted to be a well written story, Druckman somehow baited the entire industry and consumers into accepting social discourse whistling as some form of new age art form and everyone fell for it line hook and sinker.
    It never mattered if Joel died a good death, all that mattered was that there would be people defending and people attacking it on twitter. It never mattered if the girl was a fridge or a troon or, it only mattered that people would get riled up on social media. Everything in this game follows this same logic and now you have television series feeding off of it, inserting gay sex scenes, intentional racial swapping and other "morally accepted" inserted controverse contemporary bullshit for the sake of creating fights between social groups again.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Based lynch poster, you’ve put into words a feeling I have from shit like tlou and other similar modern media. These people don’t actually care about the art that they’re creating, they just desire acclaim and attention. If Neil Druckmann cared about the games on a personal level, he would be working on part 3 or left it part 2, and not start work on a TV show.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      So Cuckman made "Bait" the videogame?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yes, but not in the way we know it all usually when someone baits they say something moronic, inflammatory or both but they don’t actually believe it or take it seriously. Neil does though everything that are in the game are 100% his opinions and thoughts.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Druckman somehow baited the entire industry and consumers into accepting social discourse whistling as some form of new age art form
      wokism was there long before druckman, he just brought it into AAA video game space like no one else. and I don't think of him as some sort of masterful provocateur as much as a fricking bad director. I mean to use all those resources, money and ND talent to produce such dumb torture porn story is just disappointing. personally I wouldn't want to work there after tlou2 if I had any artistic integrity. neil probably sees himself as lars von trier of video game but he's much closer to pic related.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It clearly didnt work how he wanted. Tlou2 under performed and hurt naughty dog's reputation significantly and the show is reviewing badly after the finale.

      Shock culture fatigue is setting in. Nature is healing

  119. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I didn't hate that he got killed since I didn't invest in him or any of the tlou characters enough to trigger certain emotions, but I did find the way it lead to his death stupid, like Netflix tier or random soap opera tier death. No I didn't want a heroic death, the nonsensical death has better impact and is "true" to the theme of the game but this one was worse than "nonsense". It was below that, it needed:
    >Abby finding out the one place Joel lives without substancial proof just hearsay
    >Snowstorm
    >Horde
    >Joel and bro on patrol that exact time
    >Her getting lost because if the rest of the party saw Jackson they'd leave her
    >Joel finding her
    >Joel saving her from the horde
    >Abby leading Joel to a trap
    It's not just "plot armor" that's a whole "plot fortress"

  120. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I dont think so
    You cant kill off a protagonist whilst simultaneously introduce the killer as a new protag. People just don't like it. You'd have to do some seriously writing gymnastics in order to justify it to the fans and they didn't even try, they just assumed that shock value would be enough to get people on board.

    When people literally dont want to even play the game because they dont like the very first story beat and dont want to play as the protag, you fricked up, Its like Donte from DmC taken to 11.

  121. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joels death should've be a plot twist
    >Start the game playing with Abby
    >She's travelling the country looking for the man who killed her father
    >all the game should focus on Abby trauma to make the player feel sorry for her
    >In the finale Abby finally find him, and then they reveal that was Joel all along
    >Abby kills Joel
    >Ellie sees everything
    >game ends with a cliffhanger
    There much better, but I still think the series would be more interesting if it was different stories or maybe different worlds

  122. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Unrelated but that synagogue scene was so fricking embarrassing. Even my super liberal gf thought Dina comparing surviving the zombie apocalypse to the holocaust was horribly stupid and heavy handed. Frick the fact that they think any criticism of it is just antisemitism.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      No you don't understand, you had to be triggered/shamed/embarassed from getting lectured by a digital israelite! It was all part of the gameplay.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      No. There was entirely too much convenience for it to take place.

      >can shoot the scenery in every other location
      >can't do it there because you know its so hamfisted, people would push back if you don't take control from them
      This is the classic problem with virtue signaling, cowards want to make a statement but take every possible precaution to prevent any response

  123. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It’s genuinely moronic. Why would Tommy and Joel, two guys that have been surviving for over 20 years, and are responsible for protecting Jackson, make such rookie mistakes? It all feels contrived, and feels like Neil just want some cheap shock value while killing off Joel as fast as possible.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >T-they grew soft, the brilliant mind that is Druckmann thought of that too!

  124. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TLOU2 is poorly written

    Its overtly manipulative, Abby the character in the opening scene isnt consistent with how she is written for the rest of the game. The game opens with one character and then does every single emotionally manipulative thing possible to make you say "omg dont you feel bad for her? Look, shes nice too. Dont you feel bad for killing the dog???"

    Thats the entire narrative, with the addition of some random sidestory about helping a trans kid that doesnt really feel like it has a point; "look, we are gonna emotionally manipulate you into liking this person. Also, revenge is baaad"

    TLOU1 is about what a parent would choose; their child or the entire fricking world. Its hundreds of times more interesting than "revenge bad"

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      how the frick did she manage to not drop the stacked one but the one she was gripping?

  125. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Could have been handled much better. The non linear/flashback focused story is a mess and reminds me of Man of Steel, which came out alongside the original Last of Us.

    First half of the game should have been playing as Abby and Joel should have been a boss fight. Then the second half is Ellie hunting down Abby. The players are mostly never going to accept Abby because she kills Joel at the start and it's in an unplayable cutscene.

  126. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    no, it's one of the most pointlessly contrived things I've ever seen in any media.
    what needed to happen:
    >Abby carefully plans an ambush for Joel, kills him, but accidentally leaves some sort of clue for Tommy and Ellie to follow
    what actually happened:
    >Abby just happens to run off away from her group
    >she just happens to get caught by a horde
    >Joel just happens to be on patrol that night
    >he just happens to be in a place where he can rescue Abby
    >he just happens to decide to save her
    >he just happens to be in time to save her
    >they just happen to be too far out to go back to Jackson
    >they just happen to be close enough to Abby's hideout
    >the horde just happens to dissipate when they get there
    >Joel just happens to let his guard down and tell them his name
    >Tommy just happens to have his eyes closed when Abby pulls out the shotgun
    >Joel just happens to be looking the other way when that happens
    >Abby just happens to decide to torture Joel for no reason
    >meanwhile Ellie just happens to be in the area
    >she just happens to get the news that Joel is missing at a specific time
    >she just happens to try and look for him at the place where he is
    >she just happens to not shoot Abby when she sees her
    >she just happens to not check the room properly and gets ambushed
    >she just happens to drop her knife in the fight
    >Abby just happens to decide to spare Ellie and Tommy
    >but Abby's group just happened to be wearing patches that state who they are and where they come from
    if ANY of these coincidences didn't just happen to occur, nothing in the rest of the game would be possible to happen.
    this is the kind of writing that I would fail a middle schooler for turning in. it's embarrassing.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      What’s more insulting is that originally Abby was supposed to infiltrate Jackson, and have a plan to kill Joel.

  127. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Based Abby STILL making homosexuals seethe over a forgettable character from some cinematic shit. Utterly pathetic that people got so butthurt over it.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >n-no getting btfo was part of my plan I swear

  128. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Imagine starting the game as Abby, using those muscles to destroy infected and humans. You just lariat the horde just so you can get your thick brick muscular ass into Jackson. You kill every guard that gets in your way to get to Joel, you drop kick Ellie, piledrive bomb Tommy, elbow drop on Dina's nose and but you don't kill them because you are better than Joel. You seperate him from the group inside a burning building, you 1v1 him and show how superior you are to him. In the end you monologue to him about your dad as you break his neck. Ellie finds your jacket and the insignia on it and she starts chasing you down weeks later after healing.
    Instead fans were ok with the golf...

  129. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Killing Joel wasn't the issue. Forcing the player to play as the killer in a stockholm syndrome style of forced empathy was the issue. Who the frick wants to play as someone who just killed their favorite character and is actively targeting the other favorite character? I'm thankful everyday this piece of shit leaked on here so I wouldn't make the mistake of spending $60 on it. Druckman is a fricking hack.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      finally, someone mentioned the leak. I was remembered laughing so hard watching them and we went crazy about it. the leaker just toying with us tho.

  130. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it was a very bad mgs2. should have started as ellie, then have HER lose everything in the pursuit of revenge, then have a have to lose boss fight at the end with ellie. it was so simple to fix tbh.

    also, make her a sexy e-girl instead of an ugly troony

  131. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Subversion in literature aims to overcome or improve a conception by delivering a perspective and a solution in such a way that the audience as a whole can understand.

    The sequential order in which the facts are presented in part two obstructs the audience: the facts are presented in such a way that the audience has already lost interest in knowing such key events because the irreversible consequences have already occurred in the presentation, which generates alienation.

    The end result is grossly disastrous and incompetent. The audience has the instinctive ability to detect garbage, even when they can't put it into words. They know when something is done in bad faith.

    There are other factors at play, in the game and in the movie, but this is one of the most important.

  132. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The story should have been told in chronological order from Joel and Ellie's flashback, till Joel's death. Then change into Tiger Woods backstory but trim it down by at least half. It's too bloated and it feels forced, specially for it being a new character and someone we are suppose to hate.

  133. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was really contrived, Tommy giving their names was dumb but would have been fine if Joel didn't just walk into the middle of the room of well armed strangers, or if before that they didn't leave their bags and weapons behind on their horses, or if before that Abby wasn't saved by her target from a random horde, or if before that they didn't establish that clickers freeze. It's been two years and that's just off the top of my head.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >or if before that they didn't establish that clickers freeze
      I'm not trying to be a dick here. I have no idea what you're talking about.

  134. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Tlou2 was only enjoyed by trannies. Even normal homosexuals detest it

  135. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Reminder that Joel's death was only added in later. There are trailers of the game with Joel and Ellie together after the Abel encounter.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Pretty sure he was always going to die like that. The trailers were an intentional misdirection.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Nah the changes were shit like Abby breaking into Joel's town and her crew having more screentime.

      It's possible the story was originally more non linear, i believe the heavy flash back focus was a late addition that they regret (not that they will admit it) the rumored directors cut is likely going to change quite a few things around.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        *originally more linear

  136. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No you butthole. 14 year old girls can't consent to a lot of things and being medically killed is high on that list of things they can't consent to, doubly so when they're unconscious. Abby's dad died because he was unwilling to give up on his dream of murdering an unconscious 14 year old girl which is not something worth avenging so Joel dying over him was moronic writing.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I just wanted one person to acknowledge to Abby that Joel only did what he did to save a kid's life. I know she already knew that and didn't care, but I still wanted someone to bluntly point it out. That he killed who he did to save someone and that she didn't.

  137. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    But poorly written that they had to handwave a bunch of time passing and now he's more trusting despite the fact that the world is still hell.
    Everything directly thereafter that tries to make you sympathetic to his killers is ineffective to anyone that isn't easily manipulated.

  138. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    game was so bad i didnt finish it and i didnt pay for it, i got it for free during a game pass trial

    its that bad

    so, uh. why would anyone think this is some how amazing i dunno, but good luck with your shit taste in vidya

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I played it on my switch

  139. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's not about Joels death being good writing or not, it's the fact that you have to play and watch the killer's story for 90% of the game as if you were supposed to give a FRICK about them.

  140. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Come in his death was fine, it was the rest of the game that didn't make any sense.

  141. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it was a bad idea handled badly.
    he should had died at the end of the game, setting the third one about ellie going for vengaence, and the game making you play as a troony murderer? that was the worst part.

  142. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Remember, the only way to end the cycle is revenge is to kill everyone except for the person you want revenge on

  143. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was shit like already pointed out in this thread, but the thing is, they could have made it 10 times less shit but simply switching the timing of his death, have us play as Abby for 10 hours and then have the big reveal of her past and her killing Joel, it still has major flaws , but at least you don't have to go through half a game with a character that is simply impossible to like and connect with.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      this but make abby a likable and relatable character instead of that ugly troony on steroids shit they made her into. also have a chapter about joel portrayed as regretful old man tired from all the struggle and ready to die from whatever fate has in store for him. ellie's revenge part would had to be rewritten because it's really dumb and ending makes no fricking sense.

  144. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    There's nothing inherently wrong with killing off Joel but the entire scene is fricking moronic.
    >Joel and Tommy completely trust utter strangers when all of their experiences and choices up to that point would tell them not to.
    >Abby and gang are complete morons and all blindly trust that Joel and Tommy are alone and and make no effort to relocate, expedite Joel's killing, or even the most basic precaution of putting someone outside the door. Abby should be dead except-
    >Ellie has her frontal lobe removed. Despite hearing signs of a struggle and getting her gun out she decides to just watch Abby kill Joel for 5 full seconds before reacting. This is someone who has had to kill to survive for years. When she finally does do something its not immediately shoot the person killing joel, its to saunter into the room looking threatening so she can be conveniently subdued but not killed for the plot.
    This is the catalyst for the entire plot. Why should I care about any of it when the whole situation so completely contrived?

  145. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No, it's death for shock value for the sake of it.
    The games knows that, that's why it only accepts to make sense later, once it's done establishing the antagonist and filled the emotional stakes with flashbacks.
    It could've been handled better, like having the death happen once abby motivation is established and when joel and ellie stop talking to each other.
    But you can't have that any other way, the letmotiv of this game is "plot twist" so it delivers its story so badly that you stop caring about its characters and the stakes.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      nerfed breasts but buffed ass. Somehow I'm ok with it.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >t.american

  146. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why are TLOU fans some of the most pretentious fans in gaming?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      They're paid shills parroting talking points provided by an insufferable israelite who is seething forever over the fact that everyone knows he's a hack.

  147. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Honestly, why a golf club in particular instead of any other blunt instrument? Just to be unique?

  148. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Abby never should've existed at all. There's no way to make this story good. TLOU2 should've been about something else altogehter.

  149. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    > first game is about escorting a girl
    > no escort gameplay
    > girl can't be hurt by anything
    > second game is about forgiving your enemies
    > no forgiving mechanics
    > enemies die even if they surrender
    The last of us is the kind of game that makes me respect dev that make games about cleaning with a pressure washers

  150. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Joel was conventionally attractive, so why wasn't Abby conventionally attractive?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      sony wants angry bulldyke audience

  151. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Making Abby far too sympathetic was a betrayal of the writing because its the writers telling you exactly how to think about her character and its even worse when they finally let her live because Ellie had a flashback to Joel???
    There was nothing wrong with killing Joel or playing as Abby, its just badly written subversive trash.

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