The Last of Us Part 2 is getting internet hate. You can ignore it

Less than two weeks before the release of The Last of Us Part 2 on June 19, director Neil Druckmann said he expected the game to split players. He was prepared for some fans to hate it. I came across this prediction when I was preparing to write CNET’s review of part 2. I remember being impressed by his pessimism.

Sure, between a gay, female protagonist and an ethnically diverse group of characters, The Last of Us Part 2 had the hallmarks of a game that would provoke one of the most sensitive and volatile segments of the Internet. But I naively thought that the game was exciting, exciting and even deep enough to blunt most of the predicted vitriol.

The last few days after the game started have spectacularly proven the opposite.

If you look at Metacritic, you will find that The Last of Us Part 2 has a score of 94 based on 108 critics’ scores. The user rating? 4.8, out of almost 100,000 people. Check out the game’s hashtag on Twitter and you will find tweets that are amazed by its intensity and storytelling – sandwiched between tweets that describe The Last of Us Part 2 as deception, insult, or surprisingly, the worst game ever.

Why are people so crazy? It’s unfair to say that anyone who doesn’t like The Last of Us Part 2 is a narrow-minded troll. But the game wasn’t over a whole day before the 0/10 ratings started, so a lot is Trolling. Some of it is more complicated.

To get involved, I have to talk about spoilers. So please Stop reading now if you haven’t played the game and don’t want it to be spoiled. Seriously. Last warning!

Die as a hero

In the first few hours of The Last of Us, Part 2, you switch between two different characters: Ellie, one of the protagonists of the original, and Abby, a completely new character.

Abby has the build of a professional CrossFit competitor, and I thought about how she gained enough protein in the post-apocalyptic world of Last of Us to gain and maintain her muscle-bound figure. She travels with an organized group that is clearly on a mission. I wondered if skinny members of their community resented taking extra portions of chicken and steak.

This mindset was interrupted when Abby swung a golf club against Joel, the other main character of the original game, and slapped him in the skull during a cutscene during an Ellie section of the game.

You play as Joel during the first game and within a few hours he is dead. Ellie is the hero now. This is the problem, according to a vocal minority of apoplectic fans.

It’s not just that the protagonist is a woman or that she is gay (although there are many objections to it). It’s not just that Joel dies. It’s the case that Naughty Dog advertised a sequel with Joel, but he was replaced almost immediately. To make matters worse, you play most of the second half how Abby, Joel’s killer.

All of this is unacceptable in the minds, tweets, and metacritical reviews of some angry players. Some accuse Naughty Dog of sacrificing Joel for no reason. Others suggest that the studio could promote its values ​​for social justice. Aside from her anger, dull and imprecise, she glossed over an important detail. If you play The Last of Us Part 2, you will see that Naughty Dog killed Joel for a reason.

Live long enough to see yourself as a villain

The last of us part 2 is a story of revenge. Revenge doesn’t just advance the plot, this is a video game about revenge itself.

After Abby kills Joel, her motive becomes an immediate question. She doesn’t seem like a bad person. If a game makes you play as someone, it usually means that you’re a kind of hero. Is Abby a hero? Was Joel’s death justified?

Yes, we are learning. Yes, it was.

The original last of us follows Joel’s trip to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies, a militia group that came into being after being infected with Cordyceps. Ellie is immune to the infection that turns everyone else into zombie-like creatures called The Infected, and the Fireflies want to investigate it. When Joel brings Ellie to one of her hospitals, he learns that they have to have brain surgery. She will die in the process. In response, he kills everyone from dozens of Firefly soldiers to doctors preparing for the operation and “saves” the day.

This surgeon preparing to operate on Ellie? That was Abby’s father. You can find this out in the second half of the game, where you mostly play as Abby. Here you will learn that Abby’s motives for hunting Joel are just as legitimate as Ellies for hunting Abby.

At the end of the game, both Ellie and Abby have the option of killing each other, but ultimately leave the other alive. This is another important complaint: Joel died to trigger a story of revenge, but in the end Ellie doesn’t really take revenge. Therefore Joel’s death is meaningless.

But characters strive extremely for revenge, sacrifice personal relationships for revenge, and their moral values ​​are distorted by the appeal of revenge. This game is about examining motivations, characters and salvation in a way that is remarkable for an AAA video game.

This is why Naughty Dog killed Joel.

It is unlikely that many of the people who leave 0/10 reviews on Metacritic or release their frustration on Twitter will appreciate this. Much of this activity took place in the 24 hours after the release of The Last of Us Part 2. The game lasted 29 hours.

The pleasure of being wrong

I went to The Last of Us Part 2 and expected not to like it. Naughty Dog’s Modus Operandi for his Uncharted series – devising set pieces and then inventing a story around them – has always rubbed me wrong. I don’t like video games borrowing Hollywood’s visual language to tell stories.

It took me about a dozen hours to change my position, and from then on it only got more exciting. The last of us part 2 rules.

The game is not perfect. Some say it can feel chunky. Exactly. It took me about 5 or 6 hours to get used to the character movement, which consistently felt unwieldy. And as the story inspires, there are questionable moments when characters behave in a way that contradicts their motives.

But Naughty Dog did so much right between the complex characters, the thoughtful story, and the exciting gameplay. Getting involved with the imperfections would be absurd.

While there are some honest players who just didn’t like The Last of Us Part 2 story, many of the people who fuel the game’s score on Metacritic or tweet abuse on Twitter are not interested in an honest rating. This is obvious to the thousands of people who launch anti-women or anti-gay bigotry, but unfortunately it also applies to the thousands who claim to be offended by the bait and switch that Joel’s death represents, but probably haven’t played enough of the game to see where this road leads to.

So that’s the bad news. Tens of thousands of people use the anonymity of the internet to trade The Last of Us Part 2. The good news? The Last of Us Part 2 is the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 game ever. Sales of 4 million units in just three days.

Millions of players have no problem with diversity. They want to play games that take risks with their stories, even if thousands have a problem with them. The Last of Us Part 2 takes these risks and its 4.8 meta-critical user rating can certainly be ignored.