Last of Us II delayed indefinetly.

[Immortal Weapon]

War criminal. LMAO. I'll expound more later. By the way Joel was a thief and grifter committing highway robberies when we meet him in the first game (he and Tess reference this) . He's not exactly a saint.

Joel wasn't a saint. He did what he had to. There was a humanity to Joel that Abby doesn't process. He didn't need a prop to make him a human.

First off it wasn't some vague possibility. They flat out indicated they had found it and Ellie made it plain in the first game she willing to sacrifice herself. It was also the survival of the human race. In a world like this the human race would go extinct eventually without a vaccine. Its no different morally then sending a soldier to die driving away with the huge bomb to save everyone.

Ellie is 14 years old. No responsible adult will let Ellie could through a decision like that.

The ending of TLoU-1 because it was framed around Joel's point of view, that was fine. But the minute you move outside that, you need to do something about that setup. If they made Abby's Dad a doctor who argued against killing Ellie on medical grounds, and was forced to go ahead by the Fireflies putting a gun on Abby's head, that would have basically been enough to sell Abby as sympathetic and highlight the tragic futility of it all, and also explain her misguided and conflicted character.

But they made her and her father into Nazis instead.

What I hate is the game retconned the existence of other immune people to justify this take. In the first game you can find audio files of the fireflies having found other immune like Ellie and dissected them for a vaccine. They failed every time. Having found those files it makes Joel position to slaughter them all easier to justify as they will treat Ellie like another lab rat continually using a method that brought them failed results.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Look I have my issues with Abby too, but don't you think this is a tad extreme?

Nazis actually did believe and practise the idea that cutting up people for science was justified if it benefited society.

So

A) It's apt.

B) The second game, The Last of Us Part II, normalizes that mindset to a degree that made me shocked. So I think it's imortant to use the right terms to sound an alarm.

I think this is a result of incompetence rather than malice. And a development team trapped in the echo-chamber of their success so much so that they have forgotten the entire point of the ending of the first game.

The Last of Us was entirely Joel and Ellie's story and their point of view, so the ending worked emotionally even if in narrative setup, the concept of killing a girl for a vaccine didn't make any damn sense whatsoever. But, it was fine, if you accept TLoU as a standalone without a sequel in mind, which is how that game was made. The minute you step out of that point of view, you are left with the stupid setup and you now have to find a way to get past that. The game developers didn't, instead they created a squad of characters who entirely believed, to a person, that killing a child for the sake of a vaccine, right down to Mel, a doctor who understudied with Abby's father, was justified.

You can't sell that concept. The Bioshock games are stuff I have issues with too, don't get me wrong, but at least they understood the concept that medical experimentation of humans was evil and amoral, and something that Nazis did.

What I hate is the game retconned the existence of other immune people to justify this take. In the first game you can find audio files of the fireflies having found other immune like Ellie and dissected them for a vaccine. They failed every time. Having found those files it makes Joel position to slaughter them all easier to justify as they will treat Ellie like another lab rat continually using a method that brought them failed results.

Glad that you brought that up.

I mean that means that Abby's Nazi Dad already killed a bunch of other people.

And again the staggering incompetence. They found a bunch of immune people and they keep killing and dissecting them again and again. These are all quacks.

The second game has an audiograph that says that even if they find another immune person it wouldn't matter because the doctor who could synthesize it (i.e. Abby's Nazi Dad) was killed.

[Triniking1234]

For me, Lev was such a cliche plot-device/character that I couldn't care for him. Rather than create an actual character, they gave it transgender issues to doll up a prop, have it walk alongside Abby, and direct sympathy waves at her. It was so obviously manipulative.

It's also unbelievable. We are expected to believe that over the course of three days, Abby a war criminal who has committed ethnic cleansing and murdered and tortured many seraphites, would suddenly risk it all and walk out of her loyalties all of a sudden. It was too short a period to artificially jig up a first-game Joel-Ellie bond between her and Lev. The first game remember had a time span of basically a year or several months. They try and contract that in three days.

The story was very poorly structured and premised. There are hints of interesting stuff in the game, but on the whole it just falls flat.

Well, that part of the story has some issues.

So she saved Lev from being some sicko's bride after they bailed her out but what was the endgame? She couldn't indoctrinate Yara and Lev into WULF so she would've had to ditch WULF to ensure their safety and that only works out in the end because her attachments to WULF, her close friends and the leader, get killed during the story.

[Farealmer]

Joel wasn't a saint. He did what he had to. There was a humanity to Joel that Abby doesn't process. He didn't need a prop to make him a human.

Leaving the rest of this aside because it's clear we aren't seeing eye to eye, this is wrong. The whole point of Sarah in the first game was to show Joel was a decent guy before all this and to foreshadow that getting a new daughter in Ellie can return him to being a decent one.

The biggest issue is the game didn't do the same with Abby. When we first see her she is already obsessed with revenge and by the time you play her the damage to her rep is done. It would be like playing as Joel in the first game when he's robbing and killing with abandon then showing us Sarah to try to justify it. The game structure didn't do Abby any favors.

Well, that part of the story has some issues.

So she saved Lev from being some sicko's bride after they bailed her out but what was the endgame? She couldn't indoctrinate Yara and Lev into WULF so she would've had to ditch WULF to ensure their safety and that only works out in the end because her attachments to WULF, her close friends and the leader, get killed during the story.

Wasn't that the point of sending them away with Owen?

[Drako]

What I hate is the game retconned the existence of other immune people to justify this take. In the first game you can find audio files of the fireflies having found other immune like Ellie and dissected them for a vaccine. They failed every time. Having found those files it makes Joel position to slaughter them all easier to justify as they will treat Ellie like another lab rat continually using a method that brought them failed results.

Even though the Doctor did kill more people trying to find the cure and i agree that killing the only immune person is a wack science, they other ones were not immune.

https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/...n%27s_Recorder

[Triniking1234]

First off it wasn't some vague possibility. They flat out indicated they had found it and Ellie made it plain in the first game she willing to sacrifice herself. It was also the survival of the human race. In a world like this the human race would go extinct eventually without a vaccine. Its no different morally then sending a soldier to die driving away with the huge bomb to save everyone.

Unless there was some retconning, the first game runs on the fact that Ellie is somehow immune to the brain virus but the player and Joel don't find out that the Fireflies needed to kill Ellie in order to produce the supposed vaccine until the climax and it's kept a secret until this game. The doctors explaining it to Joel made it sound like it wasn't a 100% guarantee.

[Agent Z]

Nazis actually did believe and practise the idea that cutting up people for science was justified if it benefited society.

"This person practices one of the many abhorrent things the Nazis did" is not justification enough to have them labeled as Nazis. It is insultingly oversimplistic to brand Abby and her father as Nazis just because of what was a stupid and lethal medical procedure.

Ethnic cleansing means communities, groups, and so on. The seraphites are a distinct group and society. That's enough. It's not just a racial category.

Ethnic cleansing specifically refers to racial and religious groups. I don't where you got this description from but it is plain wrong.

[Immortal Weapon]

Ethnic cleansing specifically refers to racial and religious groups. I don't where you got this description from but it is plain wrong.

They're a cult which falls in line with a religious group.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

"This person practices one of the many abhorrent things the Nazis did" is not justification enough to have them labeled as Nazis.

Shouldn't the point be to call out Nazi behavior when its single digits and not when they tick all the boxes?

That's kind of what the whole "First they came for the..." poem by Niemoller is all about.

It is insultingly oversimplistic to brand Abby and her father as Nazis just because of what was a stupid and lethal medical procedure.

Well glad we agree that the procedure was stupid and lethal at any rate.

[Agent Z]

Shouldn't the point be to call out Nazi behavior when its single digits and not when they tick all the boxes?

That's kind of what the whole "First they came for the..." poem by Niemoller is all about.

Unethical scientific and medical practices are not a Nazi-exclusive trait. You're using a single action or attempted action by the Fireflies to paint them as following a very real, very harmful ideology when they're already evil enough as it is. Nazism is more than a single practice. It would be like calling a vegeterian a Hindu because neither eats meat or eggs.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

...

To bring this back on topic, what did you think of the game? What did it do right/wrong in your opinion?

[Agent Z]

To bring this back on topic, what did you think of the game? What did it do right/wrong in your opinion?

Mechanically speaking I think the game is sound and the voice acting is done well. The Abby arc is difficult for me to like but I'm hard pressed to find what I personally could have done better.

[Wall-Crawler]

I liked the game and especially the story quite a lot, I understand some of the complaints, and making us play as Abby for so long was a big mistake.
As a whole though, the story of Joel and Ellie was great and all the flashbacks were absolute gold, the last scene between them adds a layer of depth and tragic to the story.