...why are there already dead people in this opening going wholly uncommented upon?

#TheLastOfUs2

This is going to be my reaction thread, by the way. I'll comment intermittently as thoughts occur to me.

ALL OF THE CONTENT WARNINGS.

Seriously, like, it just feels like there's some worrying lacuna here. "Oh, we just found random people and had a shootout just Because?"

Hell, why are Joel and Tommy still wearing pre-apocalypse clothes? Apocalypses always go all "where's the electricity" but screw that, where's the textiles and other material logistics?

Like Jackson is nice and all, although honestly I'm kind of at a loss with the assumption that there's no trade networking being established again at what must be 10+ years after social collapse, but how do they produce their clothes and, above all, their ammunition?

MODERN CLOTHING IS NOT BUILT TO LAST LIKE THIS.

Anyways, Joel and Ellie have some Badness going on :( Good scene choreography, painful awkwardness.

Huh. New guitar mechanics. Really good guitar mechanics, actually.

I know it's shallow to say "I just wish we had this as a comfortable nothing-bad-happens" story, but I do think the gentle moments are really important to stories like this.

(side note, the accessibility controls on this game are REALLY AMAZINGLY GOOD, very specific in individual features that you can tweak in gameplay, and neither obtrusive nor patronizing.)

4 years later, Ellie has fully transcended into Disaster Lesbian. Hi, new guy Jessie! You're surprisingly cool about Ellie being w/your girlfriend!

Ellie, like her spiritual kin among the Disaster Lesbian clan Chloe Price, apparently considers showers optional.

I like the *process* of Ellie prepping for a patrol - packing up, cocking her gun, slinging her backpack onto her shoulders. It helps w/a sense of transition.

Jackson so far is charming. Decent small portrayal of a healthy-enough community.

Also now that I'm thinking of it, honestly? Why hasn't Jackson torched every single abandoned building nearby for miles?

(Ok yeah, Dina is super obviously Jewish, which I dig.)

...ok training you in combat mechanics with a snowball fight is inspired

Jackson definitely seems to have its shit together.

Oh, hi Mysterious Unnamed Person Who I Can't Possibly Know the Significance Of. I am certain you will not be significant in any way, despite my suddenly playing you.

Abby's Murderous Purpose is somewhat spoiled by her dressing like a ski girl.

Also, wow, so much would be avoided if you weren't obviously gunning for a foolish vendetta to fight an entire city.

(Owen, your moral posturing about Abby's threat to torture someone is kind of a bit goddamn late given your quixotic quest. Also, Abby, you really are a jerk already.)

Man it'd be real funny if there was a "turn around" option at this point in the game, Yoko Taro style.

Fistfighting a cordyceps zombie with bare knuckles seems like a REALLY BAD IDEA, for obvious reasons!

CW: guns

(Also ok, really, Abby, you're going to go into battle against a goddamn city with five. fucking. rounds? you are not making smart decisions!)

It's actually kinda odd you don't get access to the Uncharted 3 and (I think) 4 option of improvised weapons with whatever's at hand, too.

Ah, the time-honored classic of healing emergency health in apocalyptic scenarios: eating god-knows-how-expired snack foods.

because that's good for you.

Back to Ellie, and Combat Flirting plus lookout duty in a frankly cushy little dig! I get the argument for letting places like this still be intact, but honestly, all the buildings nearby not in active use should have been long since torn down or set ablaze.

It is revealed that the post-apocalypse must still be growing weed, which honestly feels like a bit of a mixed decision to me? That said, Jackson seems to have its shit together organization-wise.

Slow buildup throughout this prologue. Strong choice.

Ellie's greatest power is not her immunity but her indestructible weapons.

Mention of hoarding insulin and such is a bleak reminder of how fucked many, many folks would be in an apocalypse :(

Also, I'm just going to say. I have no idea how effectively fungus survives in the cold, but somehow I think that the colder climate like the mountains around Jackson would thoroughly wreck any fungal infection, even within sheltered buildings. Worn insulation, no heat?

Ah, clickers, you absolute fuckers.

Awful convenient all the generators still have working fuel huh?

Ok, took a break for motion sickness. Ellie and Dina continue to be adorable.

Also, bluntly, knowing what I know, this current series of events makes me hold Abby in contempt even *more*.

holy shit, Abby, even knowing what I know about you, this is *monstrous*. unbelievably monstrous.

like IDGAF about your trauma, Abby, fuck you, you and your friends deserve everything that happens to you from here.

Ok, that scene wasn't as bad as I feared it would be, but still, *yup*, everything here on out is... perhaps awful, but I'm not convinced it's anything other than to be expected.

Ok. Prologue over. Seattle Day 1.

Honestly, I kinda feel like it would be interesting to have played Dina and Ellie's journey to Seattle, because we're talking like...possibly months of extremely dangerous travel?

Also jesus everybody in this world is a killer.

Like, one of the weird things about the Last of Us setting is how readily people travel across immense spans of countryside, on foot or horseback, and without getting lost despite no real reference points? And indeed having *single small groups* interact across hundreds of miles?

Alright, entered into Seattle. Sort of a pseudo-open world approach, hm.

Also wow, literally everyone in this story seems to just think Torture Just Works, which, ok, that's certainly a Thing.

I may call it a night here, or soon after. So far: solid opener, good human moments with Ellie and Dina, all of my contempt for Abby.

Also, eh, not sure I like the open world structure with Seattle for pacing, but we'll see.

Alright, back to playing today.

Last night I discovered some sidequest areas and picked up a few items. So far I've only engaged with infected in various forms, though Ellie is completely gung-ho to get her murder on against the more-organized-than-expected WLF.

It seems there's a theme of "high-minded rebels inevitably go bad" in this franchise; every single group mentioned as being motivated by anything more complex than survival and mutual aid has invariably been Increasingly Radicalized Fuckers.

Wonder if that's part of the reaction

Like I'd actually like to pause here and observe this: Ellie and Dina become aware that the WLF is an organized polity, or the closest thing thereof, with presumably noncombatants. They do not pause or waver in their resolve to continue. This is the moral language of the vendetta

Where the important thing is *payback*, is showing that you cannot be harmed without consequence or loss in turn. TLOU2 is no longer a setting of universal moral codes, it is a setting of feuding polities and bands, each of which seemingly maintains its sovereignty by force.

Like, Ellie and Dina bring up the first time they killed someone earlier in the Seattle sequence, and Dina killed someone at *ten years old*. Neither appears to consider the act of great moral significance.

This is a state of civilizational collapse. TLOU2 is in a Dark Age.

As I have previously observed it personally strains my credulity that decades after the collapse there are not large polities growing with their own internal codes once more. Jackson, for instance, should by all rights be the epicenter of a series of child-villages.

(I will also observe that absent some vast sea change such as mass infertility, this is not the End of Humanity or Inevitable Human Extinction. Humans are tenacious fuckers and we've lived through waaaaay worse than stupid but inexplicable perpetual motion machine predators.)

Anyways. Stealth sequence time. Zombies as stealth sequences is kind of an interesting choice gameplay wise.

Unfortunately I inevitably botch stealth and so it is FIRE AND EXPLOSIONS time.

Honestly, I find it somewhat difficult to believe the Infected would, in themselves, pose a serious threat to a military response; it's more the spores & area denial I guess?

"Look at all that money! If we lived in the old world, woo!"

Ellie, sorry, banks don't really carry that much in their safes relative to their total funds, because money is ~data~ these days.

Real convenient all these old abandoned firearms work perfectly despite being left in relatively damp environments for decades at a time, huh?

Ok, I'm just gonna say judging by how much useful material and possibly-viable buildings the WLF have just abandoned to Infected, they really don't seem to have their priorities together in an organized and regimented fashion.

Like Jackson has clearly done some degree of clearing their surroundings and setting up meaningful infrastructure, but we've seen little sign the WLF has.

There is something vaguely mournful about seeing a post-apocalyptic synagogue.

Predictably, Dina is not a believer. This does not surprise me, it's pretty standard issue Jewish Rep, because Christian writers seen vaguely uncomfortable depicting Jewish faith.

But hey, her pride in survivorship is plausible.

Also, Dina's cavalier attitude towards this incredibly rare intact Torah - remember, Torah scrolls are parchment - is understandable but sad. It should probably be buried, if you had the time, and a scene where they did so would have been sweet.

(At least shut the Ark, seriously!)

Ok, so, the game also pointedly displays that the shul, at least, escaped Seattle. So there's that.

Definitely getting the impression this game has a Thing against violent revolutionaries.

Oh, and hey, here's a truck full of slaughtered soldiers with a mysterious note from "Isaac" about how he's so grateful the one it's addressed to has taken so many risks and will be allowed to abandon his post to join them...

Gee it looks like Isaac doesn't keep his promises.

Ok, time to actually reach the plot-significant hotel place. Again, I observe one of the oddities of the TLOU series - things are just left lying around in relative squalor, often from years prior. It's like nobody else thinks in terms beyond squatting in the here and now.

Oh hey, yet another iteration of the "Torture totally works and everyone's willing to do it" theme in TLOU.

I will also note that the nature of the Hobbesian conflict in TLOU conveniently exists to make the notion of taking prisoners or, arguably, even mercy impossible. It feels kind of game-y, even if I also kind of get it; this is one of those games where enemies really should run.

oh nooo, my beautiful horse :(

CW: violence

Welp, that was certainly a character getting shanked. Cross one off Ellie's list. I can see where they want me to feel vaguely bad about it, and it was unpleasant to watch, but...

...you started it, buddy.

Actually I'm gonna pause this one and go on a tangent for a second.

TLOU2's apparent approach has been to depict violence in a front-and-center vicious way even as it depicts that violence as inevitable. This is not an inherently bad approach! But it is also a manipulative one.

CW: violence
An up-close-and-personal killing with a knife is going to be horrendous. But shoving it directly in the camera bc the character being slain is (somewhat) significant does not inherently make the act more morally unjustified, just more viscerally uncomfortable.

That this character said "we shouldn't kill her YET" doesn't alter the fundamental reason, according to narrative logic, that he deserves death - especially given that his buddy was abt to kill Ellie & his "mercy" would be to bring her to his boss for interrogation & execution.

Also, OOF

@BootlegGirl suddenly this all makes sense. Druckmann apparently was inspired by the Israel/Palestine conflict & how his youthful anger at seeing Israeli victims lynched changed as he got older, which...

...yeah, coming from a Jewish writer, that tracks now.