Now that the dust has settled, was this an effective storytelling decision?

>>717040363 (OP)
no. now go away.

>>717040363 (OP)
yes. now stay.

>>717040363 (OP)
I would say so. I would go as far as to say that TLOU2 is by far their most interesting story to date, its got worse pacing than the first game, sure, but it also does more interesting things, as opposed to tlou1 which felt generic but very polished

No, just like everything else. Like the woman brained take on revenge.

>>717042402
Ellie is a woman so woman brained makes sense. Throughout the series Ellie is violent and crass, cursing and fighting and engaging in all the vulgarity (including bedding another woman) that should be left to men. In part 2 this violence is hugely detrimental to her psyche, and so at the end of her journey when faced with the choice to kill Abby her femininity shines through and she is unable to do it. Most likely, Ellie realizes that her place in the world is to raise children, not to fight and kill, and so she comes back to Jackson and sires 20 of by children.

The Last of Us Part 2 expert here. Yes, it was kino. /v/ was wrong as fuck. Neil is actually based.

>>717044214
I'm so close

>>717040363 (OP)
No, game also flopped it's PC port.
https://steamdb.info/app/2531310/charts/

>>717044732
Chronological is quite bad from a storytelling perspective but the 3 days in Seattle alternating were good. All the important flashbacks being at the start kinda ruin all the emotional damage however.

Also i watched Cascina (Dina's face) play it, she's terrible at it but very fun to watch so i recommend it.

>>717040363 (OP)
It was a franchise killer.
It's like they thought the game was a fluke and tried it in a tv show only for it to bomb again.

>>717045072
Play it before you talk.

>>717045423
Every single tlou2 hater hasn't played the game.

>>717040363 (OP)
Joel dying? Yes. Him dying was never the problem, it was the execution (lol) of it, and what happens beyond that.

>>717045657
yeah that became very obvious now that i finished it

>>717040363 (OP)
Yeah. People were shocked but still invested up until the perspective change. The issue was giving us control over Abby. The story should have been lonely and claustrophobic told exclusively from Ellie's perspective, with her revenge achieved halfway through the narrative with the second half of the game aging her into later adulthood and seeing how lonely and shut off she's become. Joel's death and Ellie's quest are fine. Literally every narrative decision surrounding Abby is complete fucking ass.

That all said, solid 9/10 campaign, especially on grounded. I still like Naughty Dog. Druckman is just a terrible and retarded writer.

>>717046014
Abby's side was better than Ellie's though.

>>717045423
NTA, I liked the game, but he's not wrong. TLOU was Sony'a golden child and TLOU2 butt fucked its reputation. The franchise is dead. Season 2 of the HBO show getting torn to pieces is just further evidence of a shitty script. LittleBigPlanet, Last of Us, Helldivers 2... leave it to Sony to stumble upon something potentially huge only to shir it up with retardation.

>>717040363 (OP)
The only mistake with the story was having it leak early. The kind of narrative it was going for doesn't work when it's experienced in 10 lines of a greentext summary. You can tell how much of the residual hate for the game is from people that only ever read these summaries when they repeat shit like Abby being trans while never mentioning Lev.

>>717046125
Narratively, no. Her conception as a character, her motivations, her motley band of retards, her awful love story with whatshisface, all of it is awful. Beyond awful. She shouldn't exist. "Fixing" TLOU2's plot means removing her entirely.
>Gameplay, though?
I agree with you. Her campaign was solid. But TLOU is a narrative game and Abby was a poorly conceived and terribly executed dual protagonist.

>>717046229
If (more like when) Intergalactic flops, Sony is probably going to force Naughty Dog to make a 3rd with a fanservicey ending.

>>717045051
>never show her roiding up
>show her deflated after being forced off them
all they had to do was add one shot of her doing an injection.

>>717046229
>TLOU was Sony'a golden child and TLOU2 butt fucked its reputation
I wasn't disagreeing with this, i was just saying that 2 is still a great game, better than 1 in my opinion. The main issue is that it leaked and people immediately hated it without playing it. That's what really hurt their reputation. If it came out normally and people played it i am sure it would have gone down differently. But as soon as you hear the basic plot and that you are forced to play as this girl who kills Joel of course people got mad.
>>717046416
I mean yeah i would have preferred an entirely different story from the start, i was talking about what the game currently has.
>>717046470
I don't get this obsession with this. Why do people need to see her roid up to believe she's roided up, like wtf. She also does a lot of heavy lifting throughout the game (like carrying Yara) - makes more sense that she's bigger. Also makes more sense in the first fight with Ellie. Also makes seeing her at the end more impactful. Whatever, if this is what prevents you from enjoying her or the game then...ok

>>717046420
Intergalactic will have kino gameplay like all ND games do, the question is whether they drown it underneath hours of tedium like Uncharted 4 and TLOU2 did. I don't think it'll flop, but man I wish they would just kick Neil's ass back down into the programming trenches.

>>717046648
>The main issue is that it leaked and people immediately hated it without playing it. That's what really hurt their reputation. If it came out normally and people played it i am sure it would have gone down differently.
Fair point and I agree. But even early reviews like Skillup and streamers who went into it blind had only bad things to say about it. Or, more recently, the abysmal responses to season 2. I think the game still would have provoked ire. But it wouldn't have been as large as it was. TLOU2 became a full on battlefield in the internet culture war. (And it was kino)

>>717040363 (OP)
it certainly had an effect. probably not the one druckmann wanted, though.

Funny how the second season adapting the maligned second game's story was also hated. Almost like everyone was right. What an awful troon game 2 is

>>717046894
And the second season only adapted the better part (Ellie's story). Once they switch to Abby's story in the third season, rating are going to crash with no survivors.

>>717046894
>Funny how the second season adapting the maligned second game's story was also hated. Almost like everyone was right. What an awful troon game 2 is

It also flopped it late PC port once everyone knew about the game and there was no goodwill and hype left. Almost like it's negatives don't make up for it's positives.

It's cute defenders think "you didn't watch/play it" will work and change anyone's mind.

>>717046653
I think the problem is that the game could sell 10 million copies just like TLOU2 and still fail to profit. Development costs for modern AAA games are insane and if they have another situation where the game gets delayed and rewritten several times over, then recouping the costs will be super hard, no matter how successful it is.

>>717040363 (OP)
>parents hate vidya
>parents watch the tv show
>they love it
>joel dies
>they fucking hate it and stopped watching

laughed so hard. Even normies fucking hated this

>>717040363 (OP)
no.
but it did show how important it is to have a tard wrangler.

>>717040363 (OP)
No. Ending the cycle of revenge as a narrative doesnt work when the game forces you to kill 100 other people and the dad deserved to die for trying to sacrifice a child (who was already immune proving humanity had a future evolving an immunity). The first game was good despite him. Bruce was the better writer.
Plus forcing you to play as a character I want dead to continue the story doesn't work in a video game, I could walk abby off a cliff & end the game there in a more satisfying way than the "true ending".
Finally the Israel narrative was distracting and annoying like every ham fisted story they push about it.

>>717040363 (OP)
Two things kill it as a story for me. Neither protagonist ever fully understands why Joel or Abby did what they did. Abby never understood or cared about the context of Joel saving Ellie, or the implications of Ellies immunity or the fact that her father forced joel to kill him, and Ellie never understood why Abby did what she did, she assumed it was because she was mad that Joel ruined the chance for a cure. So both protagonists are basically talking past each other, there is never any revelation of context that makes either see the truth.

The other is that Abby and Ellie aren't really repentant about their actions. They don't really get redeemed, they just realize killing people doesn't make them feel better and they sorta just give up and form a parasocial bond with children to cope. The message of TLOU1 wasn't "form a weird attachment to a child to get over your emotional trauma" so it feels weird to see both Abby and Ellie have a weird focus on children as a coping mechanism (pretty redpilled on female nature perhaps, if you're confused about this Ellie constantly talks about Dinas kid in her journal after going to kill Abby the second time). So neither character feels true regret over their actions, they just stop wanting to kill people. Abby is still extremely violent and spiteful and only spares Ellie because her parasocial attachment child wants her too.

I find the ending is misery porn but ultimately letting Abby live isn't a big deal for me. Her and Lev were likely raped and used as slave labor for months by the Rattlers so they really did end up getting the bad ending desu. It's doubtful either of them will live after Abby was clearly dehydrated and stabbed multiple times before sailing into the sea on a fucking canoe. Overall a pathetic story and very Jewish. I don't consider TLOU2 to be canon either.

>>717048706
I don't remember anything about Israel

>>717049573
Druckjew made the WLF and Scars a allegory for the israel Palestine conflict