TLOU2 is the Last Jedi of Video Games

I finally got around to playing this game after all the drama had subsided. Around launch, I actually cancelled my pre-order and picked up Day's Gone instead. It was $10.00 on the Thanksgiving PSN sale, so I thought I'd finally pick it up.

First, the game is incredibly well made from a technical perspective. The graphics aren't an enormous leap from Uncharted 4, but visual direction is impressive. Exploring the post-apocalyptic cityscape is a joy.

I really like how all the enemies you fight have names. You hear the NPCs all having casual conversations with each other before a fire fight breaks out. They will shout for each other when someone is killed, etc.

The gameplay still perplexes me. The games in the Uncharted franchise are some of the most technically solid third person shooters around, yet the same developers seem to go out of their way to make the gunplay in TLOU feel as clunky and unfun as possible.

I get that shooting is not the purpose of the game, which would be fine if the game did not constantly force you into combat encounters with large amounts of enemies. The WLF in particular had numbers that would put any local militia warlord in the Uncharted franchise to shame.

The criticism regarding the game going out of its way to appear "woke" is absolutely valid. There might only be three white males in the entire game. Every character is either a lesbian, transgender, bisexual, or knows someone who is.

There are two pregnant women in the game. One of which is very visibly pregnant and accompanies you into a warzone, where she's literally involved in a car wreck, crawling on her belly, and performing parkour.

The entire premise of the game, being Joel's death, seems shock for the sake of shock value not because it presents a very compelling narrative, and that I think is the biggest sin this game commits.

There's not enough meat on the bone narratively speaking to justify a 40 hour plot-heavy action game.

There are long stretches of the game where you are just trying to get from point A to B without any actual plot exposition which just serve as a means to pad out the game's length.

Things do happen sometimes, but most of it either happens to quickly (again shock value) and/or to characters you just don't care about.

Playing as Abby in particular is a slog. I think Abby is a fine character. She just looks ridiculous, even for a female soldier, and she's not at all what even most women would find attractive let alone men.

Allowing you to play as Abby for a significant chunk of time is a neat narrative trick, but they failed to give her anything actual sensical to do to fill the time. She spends the first half trying to get to the Aquarium to go see Owen for some reason. Along the way, she meets two Seraphites who are on the run. She befriends the Seraphites and saves their lives. Somehow, despite spending her life murdering their kind by the hundreds, then she becomes absolutely obsessed with them, risks her live to go back to where she left them, saves them, and then brings them back to the Aquarium.

Then, there's a long detour where you have to go to a hospital to find medicine for one of them.

3 hours later, you get back to the aquarium. One of them escapes and tries to flee back home. You and the other follow to this island that is under attack by your WLF friends but at this point Abby starts murdering everyone regardless of whether they are WLF or a Seraphite all while saying stuff like "Damn you Isaac" which is about the most egregious example of cognitive dissonance I have ever seen in a video game.