The last of us part 2 review Ps4#
On arrival I put the disc into my PS4 immediately, and I couldn’t stop until I finished it. The Last Of Us Part II arrived at my house in the post on June 19th 2020. I vowed to stay clear of it, if it ever did come into existence. Surely there’s no way they could actually do it justice. What if they did come back to this perfect ending, and they expanded on it, and they ruined it? That would be their prerogative of course, but man it would hurt. The idea of a sequel to the game, though clearly made logistically possible by its end, seemed unthinkable. It did make you ache and yearn to know more, but it was perfect. Suffice it to say that the ending of The Last Of Us was perfect. I like to write my reviews as spoiler-free as possible, in case there is someone who still may yet experience whatever I’m talking about. I’ve revisited it multiple times in the intervening years, and I’ve pondered how I, with each advancing year and additional little grey hair at my temple, understood and parsed the moral quandary at its centre slightly differently. I played and finished the game in 2013, and it has stayed with me ever since. The ending of The Last Of Us was the heart-tearing moment of all heart-tearing moments in video games. Everyone - f***ing except for you! So don’t tell me that I would be safer with somebody else, because the truth is I would just be more scared.’ It’s a pivotal scene, and, really, it has to be seen to be properly understood, as the animation, direction, and acting by Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker are all truly fantastic: There’s a quote from Ellie from an argument the two have halfway through the game, that gets to the heart of their joint journey: ‘Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me. Fraught with tension and mistrust at first before gradually thawing and blossoming into something beautiful, their joint arc was a wonder to see unfold. These were two lonely, guarded people, who had all but given up on ever being able to feel any sort of love or hope or joy again, and yet who nevertheless-over the course of a few months spent traveling along the razor’s edge between life and death-found a deep familial bond growing between them. Joel had of course lost his only daughter just as the outbreak began, and Ellie had been born in a world already brought low by it-it was the only world she’d ever known.
Joel and Ellie’s relationship was at the heart of this. Director and writer Neil Druckmann and his team crafted a bleak, horrifying tale that was nevertheless shot through with a warm humanity and a story of human connection that pulsed like a heartbeat revived, pushing back in defiance against total darkness and death. The Last Of Us was a masterpiece of story-telling in video games. Joel’s brother arrived then, and saved Joel from the soldier, but Joel’s efforts were for naught. The soldier opened fire, and Joel spun into the bullet to protect his only child cradled in his arms. Joel pleaded with the man, trying to prove that he and Sarah were okay, but it all fell on deaf ears. The soldier had his orders: Any suspected of infection had to be put down, lest they turn and help spread the disease. It all ended out in the darkness, in a ditch away from most of the chaos, with a brief promise of escape shattered by an overzealous, paranoid soldier, pointing his rifle at Joel and Sarah. Through fire and panic and death, we tried to make it to some safety somewhere. Out the back door we ran after an infected neighbour tried to attack us. It was spread by bites, and by air-born fungal spores. The infection turned normal people into raging, flesh-eating Infected. The prologue of The Last Of Us, set twenty years before the main plot, followed one life-changing night in Joel’s life, as a tranquil evening with his daughter Sarah was transformed into hell on Earth by the arrival of the disease to his Austin, Texas suburbs. The catch? That cure might be found in Ellie, whose secret is that she is the only person in the world known (by a handful of people) to be immune. It followed Joel, a middle-aged smuggler, and Ellie, a young teenage girl, as they traveled together across the country over the course of a few months, in search of a potential cure for the fungal infection that had caused the apocalypse. The Last Of Us was a third-person action-adventure survival horror title that took place in a post-apocalyptic United States. There are not many games that have affected me as much as 2013’s The Last Of Us, superstar developer Naughty Dog’s much-lauded swansong for the PlayStation 3. (Note: this review is largely spoiler-free)
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