No more pallet puzzles: THE LAST OF US PART II

Also OMG at the banner image here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastOfUs2/

So what about the annoying things in this game?

- You get to use the flamethrower like twice
- You get to use the silenced submachine gun for the last scene only
- On 'normal' you never have to worry about health or supplies
- Big resource drops spoiling the tension of upcoming confrontations
- Proximity bombs never needed. In fact, you rarely need to do much more than switch between silenced weapons, long-range weapons and the shotgun. Maybe this is different on hard/survivor - you actually have to plan your attacks and how you're going to switch up the damage you deal?
- Easy finale in Santa Barbara
- THEY DID YARA DIRTY I mean honest to fuck. Yara is like the whole thing for Abby. Yara's what inspires her to go rogue. She risks her life to pay Yara back. Now I'm not saying Yara shouldn't have bitten it, fine, that's an artistic choice. But after it happens, not one scene of Lev grieving for her? For the sister who saved his life again and again? Not one scene where Abby remembers her? I know, they have to escape, but what about after that?

JFC: https://kotaku.com/new-the-last-of-us-part-ii-trophies-tease-grounded-mode-1844678713

Who are these people who think this game isn't hard enough?

Permadeath is an insane option

It’s not quite hard enough on “normal” thi though, as documented in this thread

I thought it was, but ok, for argument's sake, sure - there's already a million adjustable difficulty options to make the game that much harder

Yeah - for me the sweet spot was making resources a bit more scarce.

God knows how I'd ever beat the section where you're escaping from the house with Lev and Yara on the other side of the door if all the difficulties were ramped up including enemy damage etc

oh man, this game

just watched a playthrough. I could not play this game; too violent and scary to actually inhabit the controller & feel all those deaths, and I definitely tabbed through a lot of the puzzle / assault sequences. but being able to tab through -- well, I definitely get the crossover hype / interest in non-gamers, this is a form of narrative more effective than anything television is capable of right now. this game totally takes advantage of 70 years of art film vocabulary like Tarkovsky / Rivette / Akerman and flips it all back over into Romero mainstream narrative storytelling

still a lot to figure out, but yeah, cried twice

Did you play the first one Milton?

skimmed the first 35 minutes of a playthrough. yikes!

only three games I've actually played myself in the last 30 years are Katamari Damacy, Journey, Monument Valley. I don't like holding the controller for first person shooters, but certainly have seen friends playing things like Bioshock etc as the games slowly evolved into whatever this is

Haha, you and I are the same gaming program. Although I did get sucked into one of the Far Cry ones (I think it was 3?)

I started NG+ on Survivor, mainly because I want to get all the collectibles AND also use the item pinging option.

blog it for us Leee

Well here's a start:

Got to the first infected house as Ellie and kind of just noped the hell out -- the thought of getting the mechanics of stealthing and down infected rn seemed a little more daunting, especially as I try to re-acclimate to the combat on a higher difficulty level!

(This all after I kept eaten alive in that Abbie prologue in the snow; in the end, I killed one runner and then just ran away from the ones that I could. I expect this will be a familiar refrain.)

WELL. I can’t just creep up behind clickers anymore on Survivor, as anything faster than the slowest crawl will alert them.

I looked at the trophy list and goddamn it but Grounded and Permadeath are both part of the platinum.

Sorry, platinum claim is a lie: https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/the-last-of-us-2-all-trophies-and-how-to-get-the-platinum#dig-two-graves

permadeath in a game like this is absurd!

TBF you can enable it on any difficulty, so if I'm in an extra masochistic mood and decide I want to try a Permadeath run, I'll probably do it on the easiest difficulty.

Also, I'm clearly sneaking up on the clickers wrong: https://youtu.be/qCV4ivXi190?t=5206

I might have to reload an autosave (hopefully) because I had to clear that section with 6 bullets.

I've been thinking a little about the shape of the narrative as it relates to empathy, namely how as you approach Abby and Ellie's confrontation, the amount of empathy the player has for each character is a mirror image. We start off liking Ellie, but over her Seattle section, she does more and more to lose that empathy; when we play Abby in Seattle, it's the exact opposite, but we grow to empathize with her the more we play her.

Finished this last night. Goddamn it.

Based on some of the clickbait-y online discourse I was really worried the story was going to be misery porn. Thankfully it isn’t—it’s heavy and sad and even mildly upsetting at times but it is earned. I was constantly taken aback by the quality of the acting and how much the performances carry the story, even through the weaker parts.

Gameplay-wise it felt almost identical to the first but I was pretty cool with that. Graphics obv were amazing.

Things I didn’t care for:

-The Seraphite cult was a little undersketched and kinda corny. Loved Lev though, he was cool.

-While I wouldn’t quite call them afterthought, the infected could have had a bigger presence in the game. As a monster lover I really wanted more variety in their types. That said, the infected coming out of the walls and the big blobby Thing-like hospital basement monster were pretty gnarly.

Overall pretty fantastic game.

welp
https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/the-last-of-us-show-hbo.html

I'll probably watch it someday. I'd prefer if it came up with an original set of characters and story, but I doubt they're gonna go that way

ahh the lure of “original IP”

man what an experience. i'm trying to retain some critical faculty and say it had the storytelling quality already common to contemporary fiction or season-length tv, but something about the identification-thru-control of video games adds a much more direct connection in terms of pathos. i was frequently very impressed and more often moved than i have been by, idk, HBO in a long time

i followed the culture war skirmishes of its release only passively but in retrospect it's maddening. sure you had lots of plainly bigoted resistance -- queerness and (uh oh) Gender Trouble is front and center thru the entire story. but there was plainly a ton of snarling anguish at being made to feel something people didn't want to feel.

the worst you can say about the story thematically is that it's hypocritical. like are you really giving me an extended meditation on the warped produce of violence while i'm pulling off so many sick headshots. the worst thing you can say about that gameplay is that it's Cabinet Scrounging Simulator 2020.

i think it pulled off a modernist tragedy. the double revengers arc doesn't complete either way, it's just laid down too late. neither heroine is able to make herself understood to the other. more than just a thwarted crowd-pleasing "rivals teaming up at the finale." ellie doesn't make the final boat trip to catalina herself, maybe to give to the fireflies what joel prevented (though i think it's hinted that mel was abby's father's intellectual heir; so much for that)

i just realized looking at this thread title that there is one (1) pallet in part II and it's a gag

did you ever figure out a slick way to deal with the dogs? they probably gave me more anxiety than anything else in the game.

cry and retry?

not really. pick off the handler from afar, after that the dogs just kind of wander in place

https://kotaku.com/senior-couple-was-having-trouble-with-tlou2-he-answere-1847996198

OK, I just dipped in for a few minutes. My first reaction was, wow, does this game look good. My second was the legit emotions that washed over me, which really underscores how incredible the first game really is. It's immediately such a bittersweet reunion, and I can only imagine things don't get sunnier. Thankfully, I've somehow managed to remain spoiler free, but that inevitably means it's going to be an extra wrenching run.

yeah you have no idea :/

word

I'm barely into it, but I called down my wife to check out the early snow scenes. She was impressed, and said "just looking at this makes me cold."

She asked me if a video game has ever made me cry, and I said totally, at their best they are just as effective as movies and books or whatever. The beginning of "Ori" is up there with the beginning of "Up."

Man, the weight of this game ... things got really dark and shocking and mean pretty quickly, even for "The Last of Us."

The technical achievements of this game alone are kind of mind blowing. But most impressive, even early on (I'm in Seattle) are all the details that they just didn't have to stick in but did, not just foliage or tiny remnants of the "old" world but character moments as well. Ellie was at the music store with Dina, and there's that moment with the A-ha song where I realized, huh, they had to pay the rights for this song and write and animate this whole sweet sequence, but the section is not only totally skippable (afaict), I could easily imagine some folks missing it entirely on the way to the next properly scripted story moment.

Game's really ramping up. Just hit the TV station and tunnel sequences. It does a great job nudging you toward different strategies/approaches, like using bricks or bombs not just to take out WLF but to attract clickers to them. Def. pretty brutal. I assume (hope?) it evolves into more than just a vengeance quest, but if it doesn't the scenery alone should suffice.

It's pretty amazing this was made for the PS4, though I guess the likes of God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn did a pretty good job showcasing that system, too. TLOU2 was I guess optimized for the PS5, but I think it was just limited to a better frame rate, which really underscores the current generation's place (at least for now) as a sort of PS4 Pro Pro.

The birthday side trip to the science museum was predictably touching. It's the quiet moments that really made the first game, and they seem to be a highlight of the second as well, though I do sense that the story is set to shift.

https://media.giphy.com/media/UrsOTbx6xh20IXChwR/giphy.gif

That's more frightening than anything in the game.

And now there are dogs. Fortunately, From has eroded any sympathy I have for video game dogs.

Just encountered the creepy whistling people. I don't think I like them very much.

About to begin Seattle Day 3. It's wild how you simultaneously play as Ellie but also feel so bad for Ellie, the character, external to you, the player.

Lol there’s a few twists in that tale

I've managed to keep myself totally spoiler free for the past two years, but I have been playing the game knowing that for a certain set of people the game was "divisive." I may possibly be playing that section right now? I see its narrative/thematic value, but I can also see how it's maybe for some a bit like the island segment of "Red Dead Redemption 2." I dunno, I have no idea what bothered some people, maybe I haven't hit whatever some consider a sticking point, though more likely the people complaining were just assholes.

Still have no idea how the game/story is going to end, so it remains pretty compelling.

I think that's more or less the case, though it happens at a very confrontational inflection point because that part of the game ends on a cliffhanger, and I really wanted to find out what happens to Ellie! But I gradually got used to it.

Yeah it begins to take some incredible turns after Ellie's 2nd day. Where you at now?

I've been playing as Abby for a while now. I just teamed up with some Scars/ex (?) Seraphites on the way to see what's up with Owen at the aquarium.

Anybody done this on “Grounded” difficulty? eg they hear everything, very high damage, almost no supplies, and you lose the ability to see through walls. I did Part 1 this way and loved it

I imagine that might be a fun way to play if you know the game really well. Or if you want it to seem more "real."

Hmmm, it looks like I have 5 more acts/14 chapters of this game to go. That's a bunch!

I think I generally don't want my narrative games to be too hard, can't believe people play the Ironman mode for game that's as long as this

OTM. I think the Gail and Eugene bits were added to replace the flashback scene where Ellie goes back to SLC and listens to the tape recording. They needed a mechanism in place for Ellie to know for sure what Joel had done. In that sense I get it, but it's not as powerful as Ellie going to the scene of the crime and seeing what Joel did herself as she did in the game, but in this case I bet it was budget that led to this narrative change.

Two other changes in the finale bugged the hell out of me which I felt totally detracted from the story, and there are some interesting, if extremely unsatisfying, answers from the show runners. First, Ellie's visit to the Seraphite Island - this felt like some rushed, cheap mechanism to attempt to dumb-splain an audience where the WLF was attacking that night. Here's Druckman's explanation:

Neil Druckmann: I will, just to add to that, because, you know, sometimes in adding something that was cut from the game requires you to remove something that was in the game. So, here that sequence where Ellie like drifts to the Seraphite Island and almost gets lynched herself was something we used to have in the game and cut it for just production pacing purposes. And then now- now we had like three horrible things in a row, we had like that sequence, Alice and then Mel. And in our conversation, we're like this, probably one, one too many.

Perhaps it was cut from the game for a reason? You know ... production pacing? Which its addition in the show mars? That whole day 3 approach to the aquarium was just perfect in the game as is. There was no need for such a side quest! So what did they cut then to balance? Alice, the other change that really had me scratching my head. Here's the justification for that from Mazin:

“In the game, when Ellie arrives in the aquarium, a dog attacks her and she stabs it to death, and we don’t know this dog,” said Mazin. “I won’t get into what happens later, because there’s referring to what’s next season, but we had a situation where a number of horrible things were happening. Plus, because it’s live action, the nature of violence becomes much more graphic. It’s more graphic because it’s not like there’s an animation between you and it, it’s people, and it’s very disturbing. We knew what was going to happen to Mel was disturbing, and to Owen, and also what had just happened to Ellie was disturbing.

I felt Alice and the gruesome and ruthless nature of Owen and Mel's deaths really highlighted how dark Ellie had truly become, and really amplifies these moments' importance after you go through Abby's perspective and build empathy for them. Ellie's actions and ruthlessness mirror Abby perfectly, and I feel the show is trying to maintain a semblance of moral superiority or "innocence" within Ellie here that not only feels off with the story, but even at odds with the character as portrayed by Bella Ramsey.

Ultimately this post is just repeatedly underlying your point, Josh, in that the changes made seem to undercut the themes of the game.

It's like they took out some of "the juice". Alas.

That's the bummer of it all. The fundamentals of the game are still there, they've just been ... weakened or watered down, I guess. Which is the prerogative of any adaptation, but then why adapt something if you are going to denature it? This show feels sort of like one of those awkward or wayward director's cuts of a movie, a new version that fundamentally changes things by putting stuff back in but also takes important stuff out. I feel like it would benefit greatly from the "Lord of the Rings" extended version treatment, longer and with more details and character beats and moments that made the source material what it is. Gail and Eugene, Bill and Frank, that sort of stuff is what should have been *added* to an extended cut, which could have made the story even better.

I do like Kaitlyn Dever a lot, and look forward to watching her in S3, but after this season I may have changed my mind and no longer see how they can do four seasons without focusing on a bunch of War in Seattle BS, though the overlapping nature of the story implies that, yes, we're going to get that epic island battle between the Wolves and the Scars. So are we going to get the Santa Barbara epilogue? Probably. Are we going to get Ellie and Dina at the farm? Probably. But have they depicted Ellie as a relentless revenge machine to the degree that would drive her to the game's final conflict. Imo no, and that was the failure of this season and maybe the crux of it all: how do you make your lead protagonist an unlikeable monster? There was no avoiding doing that for Abby, but Ellie's poor choices this season have been depicted as products of immaturity, or impatience, or, less generously, ignorance, yet in the game she knows exactly what she is doing.

From the AVClub review:

Which isn’t to say that I needed this finale to wrap up everything in a nice, neat bow. But I did want it to deliver a sense of thematic finality—to clarify the emotional beginning, middle, and end of the season, even if there’s still more plot to unspool. “What has Ellie’s revenge mission wrought?” could have been a powerful emotional button if this episode had lingered on the tragedy of Jesse’s death. “How has Seattle changed Ellie and Dina?” could have been another, if Isabela Merced weren’t so weirdly sidelined this week.

But “What did a character we don’t really know do for the last three days?” is basically at the bottom of the list of things I care about right now—the sort of hook that only exists because this show is adapted from pre-existing source material and needs to get ahead of fan explainers that would spoil that structural twist in the long gap between seasons. A good cliffhanger leaves you wanting more. This one just kind of made me shrug, especially because we already know much more about Abby’s motivations than gamers did when the POV shift happened.

HBO’s “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale aired to half the audience that tuned into the Season 1 finale of the video game adaptation, as Sunday’s season closer saw 3.7 million cross-platform viewers. That’s down 55% from the Season 1 finale, which scored 8.2 million cross-platform viewers, then an impressive feat given that it aired opposite the Oscars.

Season 2 premiered to 5.3 million cross-platform viewers.

HBO cautions that “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale viewership is expected to grow due to low tune-ins on the holiday weekend, and stressed that the franchise overall has seen 90 million viewers since Season 1 ended. Season 2 is tallying nearly 37 million global viewers per episode.

Ellie's poor choices this season have been depicted as products of immaturity, or impatience, or, less generously, ignorance, yet in the game she knows exactly what she is doing.

Couldn't have said it better myself

https://i.imgur.com/NZirtHu.png

💀💀💀

No one bit on the ILE thread, but Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross have suddenly both left the show. I know they are all pretty busy with other projects, but it's not a good sign when the two writers of the Last of Us 2 game suddenly leave the show midway through telling the Last of Us 2 story.

Eh, the show was already a bit meh, if it gets lamer so be it. Likely better that Druckmann and Gross focus on what they do best.

Well that's for sure; the show has always been a sidenote. Lotta little rumors that Last of Us 3 is in development, which was maybe inevitable (rumors and game), but if they are going to do it for sure now is the time to get going on it. That's one explanation for why Gross left as well, given she has far fewer management commitments than Druckmann does (I presume).

lol

The Last of Us Part II Remastered Chronological Experience update out today

"The free update lets players experience Ellie and Abby’s story chronologically and also includes unlockable skins and trophies."

Nathan/Sam Drake skins included in No Returnhttps://t.co/7QALDe1LNi pic.twitter.com/xQrV2aRhKO

— Wario64 (@Wario64) July 8, 2025

Latest red flag: now HBO is suggesting there may be just one more season, airing in 2027. They really screwed this up, lol. It's not like they were riffing on George Martin's napkin-scribble outline or whatever, it was all right there! It's like they spent all this time and effort on the sets and then pared the story down to its barest minimum and even then rushed through the material they had. As some other nerd noted, "Lost" was maybe an average of 20 episodes *a year*. "X-Files," too. "Game of Thrones" (as far as more recent bigger budget epic HBO fantasy goes) was 10 episodes a year for 8 seasons. The Last of Us, despite having (unlike those other TV shows) a complete start to finish narrative, is going to wind up maybe, what, maybe 25 episode total over the span of four years? And that's with all the extra stuff they added to the game/story.