The Last of Us 2 epitomizes one of gaming’s longest debates

Just finished Last of Us 2 and I am pretty disappointed.

The gameplay is tight and it's fun but the story is absolute garbage. Abby and Ellie are such unlikable protagonists and the political undertone of the story is overbearing.

You play two characters in the game: 1 is a lesbian who's girlfriend is carrying a chinese guys baby and she goes out to avenge the death of a guy she can't seem to forgive.

The other is what looks to be a steroid taking muscle woman that more or less risks her life for two people she just met while getting her friends all killed in the process.

The story is pretty bad to say the least. I say this as someone who actually walked into a store to pick it up on launch day.

TLOU2 is really a game that is too far up it's own ass.

Druckmann presents it as some sort of philosophical debate about "muh violence" when it is really a mish-mash of ideas poorly glued together, a narrative so garbage it's almost insulting, characters that do complete 180s, countless plotholes...the list goes on.

This game is nowhere near Spec Ops: The Line or Hotline Miami in terms of the violence debate. TLOU2 is 'The Last Jedi' of video games and Druckmann is the Rian Johnson of AAA gaming. Thanks Druckmann (7 years btw).

I haven't played LOU2 so I'm missing out on something, but there's nothing this article mentions about its treatment of violence that isnt already in other games.

For instance, can author really not think of any other game that has a big shooting component but also has nonviolent story elements (GTA)? Or games where you shoot things and then later wags a finger at you for shooting those things (CoD)?

The whole "ludonarrative dissonance" meme is getting real old. Games require an amount of suspension of disbelief. Why can Ezio run at full sprint and do insane acrobatics non-stop that would exhaust even most fit human? Because it'd suck of the primary activity in assassin's Creed games was delayed by a stamina mechanic. Why can Nathan Drake heal bullet wounds by simply waiting? Because it's a fast paced action shooter, realistic wound mechanics from ARMA or Escape from Tarkov would be atrocious. Yeah, this means that characters get shot and die in cutscenes when they take 5 rounds from an AK in the torso during gameplay no problem. Similarly Drake kills hordes of enemies in gameplay without pause, but the death of a named character carries weight.

Pointing out the disparity in reaction between the gameplay and cutscenes is like complaining that professional wrestling is fake. Understanding the language of gameplay entails understanding that real world interactions don't translate into most gameplay formats.

This applies to games like the Last of Us and SpecOps the Line, too. You can run around in a circle jumping for 10 hours and your companions will do nothing other than occasionally uttering a like about how you should move on. In real life they'd think you've gone insane.

I suppose the only exception to this are games with effectively no gameplay elements (e.g. visual novels and 3d games that play like VNs like life is strange), and simulation games like silent hunter 3 and DCS (where the whole point is to make gameplay resemble reality as much as possible).

Erm, we used to have types of games where you didn't just shoot everything in sight.

The games with "blow everything away" outsold them by orders of magnitude.

You can blame the games, but the money paying audience has spoken about what they want.

I absolutely reject a premise of this article, which I suppose is that violence in videogames is somehow bad or meaningful. They are best understood as toys or works of art, and their moral implications are the same moral implacations of playing with army men, or looking at a painting.

I never play games because of the story. If i want a good story i will go for books. If the gameplay and the atmosphere is fine, the game is fine (for me)