ひげ
bi-monthly last of us rant
The Last of Us is one of my favorite video games of all time, but a little while after it came out it was killed and Neil has been parading its corpse around ever since.
The main problem with Part 2 is that it's just way too preachy. It's not really about the "woke" stuff at all, although that certainly doesn't help it. You could take out all of that and you'd still have a horrible, preachy mess. The problem gets worse though, because in order to preach to you, it makes so many jumps in logic and litters plot holes everywhere. Then the game has the audacity to try and make you feel bad for not being receptive to its preaching.
Honestly, I'm of the opinion that the original's ending was never meant to be ambiguous. Maybe it turned out that way because of the disconnect between Straley and Druckmann, but they did poll testers and found that 100% of the testers who had children believed that Joel did the right thing. Neil would be the one outlier there, and he's on the record saying that. The childless testers were about 50/50 on the issue, but I know a lot of my friends who originally thought Joel did the wrong thing, as they have grown up, have changed their minds (none of them have had children). The ending presents itself as being ambiguous because of its brutality, but the more you think about it and the more you dissect it under every moral framework, it's obvious that Joel was in the right. I think a large amount of the audience ended up agreeing with him and that's why he's such a beloved character, but Neil didn't think that was right at all so he went and killed him and then gave Ellie the worst ending imaginable to cement Joel's poor character, while the characters he created without Straley get a much better ending. It really ends up feeling like a complete and total disdain for his audience and even Straley, and this is the way he took it out on everyone. Now, who knows if that's actually the case or not, I'm just saying that's how it FEELS like and that's why people absolutely hated the game and why a lot of people hate Neil himself.
There are plenty of others to not like Neil and/or Naughty Dog too that weren't mentioned in this video too, of course. Handpicking an actor/actress/whatever for the trans character in TLOU2 that had like white hatred posts on Twitter was certainly an interesting choice. Putting out official art of Chloe and Nadine being gay lovers was quite strange. Then there was whatever the hell happened to Uncharted 4 when he took the reins, including changing Nathan Drake's son into a daughter because some tester thought it would be a better idea and the whole "we don't use the word 'fun' at Naughty Dog" line.
I was never one who wanted there to be a second Last of Us game, period. I loved the way the first one ended and I always said that if there was a second game, it should revolve a completely different group of people set in the same world. Even then, I can see glimmers of things that could have made for a great story in the second game. It was just so awfully put together and had zero respect for the audience across several points of view. I didn't play it but I did watch a full playthrough of it (shoutouts to Freako) and boy... what a mess. What an absolute mess.
Now we've got Intergalactic coming out(?), which is good because at least The Last of Us will maybe get to take a break from being in front of the firing squad. It's going to suffer from a lot of the same problems but without the history of an amazing game behind it, which I think will actually make it fail even harder (and especially in today's sociopolitical climate). That whole interview with Neil you had at the end is pretty telling. A Jewish guy producing a game about a "heretic prophet" from 2000 years ago seems a little bit too on the nose for me.
