Brutal and Angry Review of Last of Us Part 2 - be forewarned.
(This is my personal thoughts about this game, be warned - it going to be very brutal and I do not have a lot of good thing to say here).
My review of Last of Us Part 2.
First I like to start off with a question of Naughty Dogs regarding this game - WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING? You just killed your own game.
**In story term** - the plot sucks.
If you going to make a game about revenge, at least do the job right and finish it with revenge. I really don't understand why the developers decided to add the element of "forgiveness" in here as if what happened to Joel was something people could easily forget and forgive. It is NOT forgettable nor it is forgivable.
This nonsense about having doubts after committing yourself to the mission (of tracking down the culprits) is weak and pathetic. It reminded me of what happened in the Walking Dead. Hell, it reminds me a lot of Walking Dead series. People felt the pain of watching their beloved characters get their head bashed in by Negan and then, the WD creators spend the next couple of season hyping us up for the big finale (between Rick and Negan) only to have Rick lose his balls. Seriously? That's the $hit you want to put in here? You want to put something that killed off an entire series (people just got fed up with the Walking Dead due to this) into your game and expect gamers to love that crap? If that is not a lazy writing, I do not know what is.
**In character and Environment designs**
From what I have seen, only Joel, Ellie, Tommy and Maria seems to be routed to the conditions they were living in, with Joel being more relaxed and humane compared to what he was in the first part. Everyone else seems to take the post-apocalyptic scenario they were living in like it was some sort of summer vacation.
Ellie seems to have erased her own past (evident of the scar which she had self-inflicted over her bite wounds, so she could hide it). It seems that everything that happened in Last of Us part 1 was put aside and Part 2 were avoiding mentioning anything related to that (except for the part which Joel had played).
Also, I notice that they have vehicles in this game. Explain to me how that these people have fuel for trucks, jeeps and boats when in the first game, Joel had to drag poor Ellie's butt across the country (except when they were driving at one part of the game and they were on horse (Callous I believe it was called, Joel hated the name)).
I thought the roads where in a bad shape, unfit for vehicles. I thought that you cannot find fuel easily. I thought people could improvise more such as what the Seraphites did with their high-rise bridges (those are one hell of an idea - using top of buildings to get across btw).
Sure, people can grow food and get fresh water. Boiling it could be sufficient enough to ensure the water is safe to drink. Growing good and livestock within a confined area like a stadium and other places should be good enough to supply the needs, as long as the population does not grow too big. But fuel and machine parts? That did not sit very well with me. It did not sound like a post-apocalyptic scenario Naughty Dogs imagined it to be in the first game.
And finally, a religious war in midst of a post-apocalyptic World. Really? You don't take time to showcase how civilization could fight to survive without the modern convenience or even the struggle to revive the technology which had been lost for the past 25 years (since the outbreak in Last of Us World) BUT you do not shy away in adding a religious war into the mix as if humanity could strive to screw themselves over some religious fanaticsm?
**In game play **
People who play the first game and this one (like myself) could notice something others normally could not. The control mechanism between Ellie and Abby are different. Ellie’s control seems to be smoother, her character capable of handling smooth transition between running, hiding, rolling, jumping etc. Abby is like a pregnant hippo.
Most of the time, she get killed not because she is not well-prepared but because she is “clumsy”. She doesn’t run properly, shoot properly, get over an obstacle faster, or even roll out of the way properly. Abby is just a horrible game design with horrible game mechanics which was torturous to use throughout the game.
The depiction of the group between the time you control Ellie and the time you control Abby does not fit or match either.
I don’t know if you notice it or not, but when you are playing as Ellie, the WLF (Wolves) are depicted as these ruthless paramilitary group which killed the previous Federal government and then took over communities through harsh rules and implementations. Basically the survivors were telling (in their notes) that WLF was worse than the Federal military to the point that they executed civilians (like Solphia, Boris’s daughter - one Ellie get her bow from) for minor things like graffiti.
BUT when you play as Abby, WLF are pictured as a “savior” group. They could find survivors, train, feed, “help” people and fight the true bad guys (the Seraphites who kill people they encounter). That does not sound like what you heard or read from the notes in Ellie's part (of the story), does it?
**Last of Us Part 2 is all about Abby, NOT Ellie.
** Get this straight, Folks. Last of Us Part 2 is about that abomination, Abby. It is NOT about Ellie or Joel. It is not about Jackson and it is not about surviving against the infected. It is all about Abby.
You don’t believe me? Just count how many “chapters” Abby got and compare it to Ellie’s. Ellie’s story is straight forward. You leave Jackson with Dina, you move around through checkpoints, you reach the theater and then you rest. Then you go out to find Tommy, reach the aquarium, shoot couple of people, return back to the theater and the story branches off to Abby.
Here, Ellie does not get any boss fights except for those new things called Shamblers. I killed them easily after dying twice simply because I made couple of mistakes in knowing the numbers, and placement of bombs. My experience with the first Part (especially in the sewers where you play with Henry and Sam helped out).
But when you play as Abby, you start off at the stadium, ambush, through the warehouse, reach the base, follow the story, leave to find Owen, meet up with Lev and his sister, continue to find Owen, screw Owen, return back to help Lev, climb UP a fucking building, climb DOWN a fucking building, return to base, get down to the lower level of the hospital, survive fighting a boss fight which seems to be borrowed straight from Resident Evil series. This is as far as I had came and so far, but to me it seems that Abby had more screen time than Ellie here.
Get ready for the harshes comment ever …
**Last of Us part 2 is Political, not a game.
** It is a political statement.
At first I thought everyone hated Abby because of what she did to Joel. But I was wrong. There was something subliminal within this game which most people did not understand and was blinded by their anger toward Abby. I’m going to tell you straight what it is and how Naughty Dog played their fans as fools (which what makes me really angry here).
When you play through the game, you going to see these picture of a woman they called the “Prophet”. A group of survivors called themselves “Seraphites” (or Scars as WLF calls them) take her as their religious leader and follows her teaching.
And in doing that, they hunt down others who are not in their group (usually adults, while they do take in woman and children as their own) and kill these adults, believing that Seraphites are setting them “free” from the corruption.
Now … why does this all seems to be … familiar somehow, I wondered. Then it hit me. The Seraphites reminded me too much of Muslim apologists in the real World.
Do you know the term Muslim apologists? Maybe this will help : Urban Dictionary: Muslim Apologist ( https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Muslim%20Apologist )
1. A person who white washes Islamic violence by **throwing out a ****distraction** (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=distraction )** **such as another religion when the subject is Islam (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Islam).
2. A person who will **call you racist or a ****bigot** (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bigot) for talking about statistics involving Muslims.
Both point 1 and 2 is within this game effectively. Naughty Dogs deliberately throw in a distraction (what happened to Joel) as means of distracting us from debating the game plot effectively. We were simply too numb, hurt and anger over what we had witnessed in the early part of the game (to Joel) to see what Naughty Dog was doing to the game in name of entertainment.
After all, the game was supposed to be about “Forgiveness”, but the truth here was, it was never about forgiving Abby or forgetting the past.
Still not convinced? Take a look at Lev, the boy who Abby rescued from the Seraphite. He was called an “Apostate” - term means someone who left the religious group. He was hunted down and ordered to be killed. His “crime”? Shaving his head bald. How is this statement about Muslims, you wonder?
In Islam, women folks are supposed to be covered up head to toe as a religious law and any woman who refused to do so can be legally prosecuted or abused by their family. Any woman who fights back this (law) is considered to fight back against Islam itself and therefore, seems to be apostate. And Apostates are marked for death in many (traditional) Islamic societies. Even in my country, Malaysia, you can NEVER change your religion from Islam to anything else BUT it is perfectly legal to change from others into Islam.
If that is not a straight definition of Islam in disguise as Seraphites in this game, I do not know what is.
As for LBGT, I think we all know that quite well. The role Dinah was in can easily be replaced by ANY male character. Matter a fact, the character Dinah is not even required in this game. But since we already had Left Behind DLC, LGBT statement is ignored largely by gamer community (or maybe even expect it so it was not as shocking as it maybe have seem in Left Behind DLC).
So over all, this game (Last of Us Part 2) is not a video game which was made for our entertainment. It was a very cleverly made political statement which we had brought with our own money and then wasted several hours (or even days) of our lives playing, believing it to be entertainment.
Comments
Post a Comment